


For the Cause

by LittleBearasaur



Category: Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-17
Updated: 2018-03-06
Packaged: 2018-08-31 11:56:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 21
Words: 39,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8577619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleBearasaur/pseuds/LittleBearasaur
Summary: It’s been 12 months since the events in China and Chris is no closer to finding closure. Piers gave his life for the cause and Chris is trying to keep going, to stay the course that Piers wanted for him, but every day is a struggle. Now the BSAA Director has re-opened the investigation into the underwater facility and Chris needs to keep it together as he faces a past he’s been trying every day to forget.





	1. Chapter 1

_“Captain!”_

Chris woke with a start, looking frantically around for the voice screaming in his head. He cursed when he realised he was alone in bed and – according to the stupid clock – it was barely two am. He ran a hand through his sweaty hair and shoved the blankets off himself. 

He padded across the room in just his boxers and opened the curtain. The window was still open though he barely noticed the cold breeze on his clammy skin. The streets were quiet below, the single street light flickering in the distance. 

It looked peaceful. For most people in the world it was peaceful, but Chris knew better. He knew better than almost anyone what shadows lurked in the darkness, what hunted in the night. 

Not even his own mind was a refuge anymore. Every time he closed his eyes hazel ones haunted him, followed him. He couldn’t get away from them. Away from the guilt, away from the loss and suffocation. He growled and punched the wall beside the window. 

Just once. Just one night, he wanted to be able to sleep. He wanted to be left alone, to be left in peace. 

With a deep breath he pushed off from the wall, ignoring the throbbing of his knuckles and grabbed his phone off the bedside table.

He swiped the screen on and ignored the picture of a face he wished he could forget. Instead he opened his messages to a specific one he had saved all those months ago. It was the last message he had been sent, before the mission in Edonia, before his amnesia, before the world went to fucking hell.

_‘Perfect score, again. You owe me a beer. The good shit, not that crap you drink.’_

He needed to delete it. It wasn’t healthy to keep around. His thumb hovered over the delete button. He pulled away, like he always did, and threw the phone onto the bed. 

Most people would say it was a sense of misplaced guilt. That the last member of his team was gone and he couldn’t move past that. But Chris Redfield wasn’t an idiot. 

He knew why he couldn’t move on. He knew what he’d had, what he’d failed to take hold of, and now it was gone. 

He would never be able to get up the courage to take what had always been freely offered. He had seen it every time those hazel eyes had locked on his, every time they had fought with him and dragged him up and made him stand tall. Even when he’d become a shell of himself, bringing everything down around him, those eyes still looked at him that way. It didn’t matter if they held regret, disappointment, and anger. Those hazel eyes could never manage to hide the part that was deepest.

He stood and wandered out into the dark lounge and through to the kitchen. He opened the fridge, wincing as the bright light shone in his face. He quickly grabbed the juice and slammed it shut again. He thought about getting a glass but it was only fleeting and he was already drinking from the bottle. 

He almost dropped it when he heard his ring tone blaring from the bedroom. What the…? 

His brows furrowed when he saw the caller. 

“Jill?” 

“Chris, thank god you’re awake.” 

His heart sped up. Last he’d heard she was on a mission in Japan. “What? What is it?” Had something gone wrong? 

“I just got a call from Barry. He said that they’re planning on surfacing the wreckage of the underground facility in China.”

“What?” No, they couldn’t. God, they couldn’t. The ghosts down there needed to stay buried. “Who gave the orders?” 

“The Director, apparently. I’d never even heard that they were thinking about it. If there were prior talks about it they were keeping it quiet. Not even a blip of a rumour.” 

“Fuck.” 

Chris flung his wardrobe opened and grabbed the nearest clothes he could find; black shirt, and some jeans. He fumbled with the phone as he dragged them on one-handed.

“I’ve tried calling some other operatives, and the Head of Operations, but they either don’t know anything or they’re keeping tight-lipped about it.” He could hear clicking in the background as though she were typing on a computer. 

“Why would they want to go back down there? Divers went down there already and confirmed that it had collapsed, with no survivors.”

“I know. I’m sorry Chris, I know Pie-”

Chris shoved his feet into his sneakers. “Just find out what you can for me, please. I’m heading into HQ now; I’ll call you in an hour.” 

He grabbed his keys and slammed the front door behind him. Fuck this. He was having enough trouble keeping the ghosts buried. He was not going to let them do this.

\---

Chris resisted the urge to strangle the Director. In fact, it took every ounce of willpower he had to keep on his side of the room. The Director may have once been an agent of the BSAA but he was clearly getting disillusioned in his old age.

“Look, Chris, I understand where you’re coming from but Intel have sai-”

Chris paced and ran a hand through his hair, resisting the urge to upend the desk. “Fuck Intel! This shit was already investigated and closed. What are you hoping to gain by bringing up the wreckage?” 

“The experiments being conducted down there were dangerous, and we need to ensure that no traces of any of it reach the surface, or allow Neo-Umbrella to get their hands on it.” 

Chris stopped pacing and glared at the Director. “Which has already been done. We spent months in that water, and we found _nothing_.” 

“It’s worth looking again.” 

Chris slammed his hands down on the Directors desk. “Are you implying that I missed something? That I didn’t search every nook and fucking cranny of that place? That I just half-fucking-hearted it?”

“I’d appreciate it if you would stop swearing at me Captain Redfield. I understand that you did everything you could do retrieve your fellow soldier bu-” 

“His name was Lieutenant Piers Nivans,” Chris snapped. He collapsed into a chair and massaged his temple. “He had a name, and a life, and he gave everything for our cause. All you’re doing by resurfacing all of this is dragging a good soldiers name through the mud, and I can’t let you do that.” 

“Chris, the virus that Piers injected himself with alone could cause unknown chaos. Imagine if it fell into the wrong hands.” 

_“Piers is dead!”_

The silence rang in Chris’s ears and he felt like he needed to punch something, do something, anything to make it stop. He wanted to make that face disappear. He wished he had amnesia again, so that he could forget. It was selfish, and the thoughts of a coward, but he didn’t care. Right now he would have given everything to be able to forget. 

“I’m putting you in charge of the investigation. As I was trying to say, there has been Intel that Neo-Umbrella has another facility near China. I want you to oversee the wreckage excavation, and find this facility. Understood?” 

Chris’s jaw clenched. “Understood.” 

“We will be putting Jill Valentine as your ATL for this one. Gather your team; you’ll be flying out in 48 hours.”


	2. Chapter 2

“Okay guys, you can begin the descent in 20 seconds.”

Chris listened as the Officer stood at the end of the boat and counted down their time to move with his fingers. He hadn’t been back here in six months, and he had been sure he would never have to venture into these waters again. 

His whole life had been destroyed in a matter of hours in this place. His future, his last surviving team member, everything.

Jill gave him a questioning look. He nodded to let her know he was fine and took a deep breath. As the Officer reached zero they flipped backwards into the water. Chris ignored the claustrophobic feeling as the water rushed to meet him. He checked Jill’s location, as well as the three man team that was in the water with them. They all gave him the thumbs up and they began their descent.

Chris thought about the first time he had descended into this hell. Piers had thought the entire situation ironic and Chris had spoken to him for the first time about taking his mantle when he retired in the near future. The true irony wasn’t lost on Chris and he cursed this place, hated it with every fibre of his being.

“Two minutes until descent to the lower levels.”

Chris resisted the urge to tell them that the levels didn’t exist anymore. The entire place was rubble on the ocean floor. The remains of the HAOS was gone, as were any traces of Piers or the virus. That in itself wasn’t suspicious; B.O.Ws tended to disintegrate on death. The bodies only stuck around if they weren’t truly dead.

He had wished that upon Piers, even knowing the pain it would have caused. He had hoped every day that they would find his virus ridden body. Even if it had meant that Piers would spend the rest of his life in a tube, it would have seemed less final than the emptiness he felt. Pure selfishness, but he wasn’t going to lie to himself. Not anymore. 

The first glimpses of glass and metal were painful for Chris, flashes in his mind of a place and time he never wanted to revisit. A place he wished he could have drunk into oblivion. He hadn’t, for Piers, but some days the lure was almost impossible to resist. 

“Um…Sir?”

Chris furrowed his brows and looked around. Two of his men, plus Jill, were there with him, but the third man had ventured further out, closer to the sea floor. 

“What is it?”

“I think I may have found something.”

Chris’s heart skipped a beat. Found something? He tried to ignore that painful flare of hope as he made his way to the diver. They couldn’t have; this place had been searched top to bottom. Every piece of sand, piece of structure, piece of anything had been moved and looked through. He had almost killed himself trying to find some trace of a body, some trace of hope that meant Piers lingered in this world. 

But they had found nothing. 

The soldier was pointing towards a section of metal that hadn’t been blasted into a million pieces. It was round and did look like it was shielding something.  
Without a word Chris began pulling the metal away, his heart in his throat. That hope was flaring, and impossible to ignore and god, if this was Piers. If someone had answered his prayers, he wou- His heart sunk as the metal lifted away. 

Nothing. It had just landed that way. Chris wanted to hurt something. He felt like it had been deliberately placed there, to destroy the last pieces of his soul along with the underground facility. 

“Sorry, Sir.”

Chris shook his head. “Could have been something. Keep looking, sailor.”

\----

“So we’ve looked here, here and here,” Jill said, pointing to the locations on the map spread out on their table. Chris looked, but he honestly didn’t care. They weren’t going to find anything, no matter how long they looked, or where they looked. He had already done all of this. 

“Chris,” Jill said with a sigh. “HQ are expecting a report, we need to take this seriously.”

“What do you want from me?” Chris asked. “We aren’t going to find anything.”

Jill was clearly trying to control her temper, her jaw twitching. She moved the ocean floor map and switched it for one of the street maps they had of the local area. 

“Let’s have a look at this one,” she said. “We need to make a plan for the next search.” 

“What for?” Chris asked. 

“HQ said there was a facility located in China.”

“HQ says a lot of things.”

Chris hated the sympathy lurking behind her eyes. She knew the pain he was in, and he knew she wished she could do something. But unless she could resurrect the dead there was nothing she, or anyone else, could do.

“Some of the divers are going back in the water today, do you want to go with them?” Jill asked.

Chris took a deep breath. They had been searching the water for almost two weeks now, bringing pieces of the broken facility up one by one. There was nothing new found; they were just bringing up a corpse. 

“No.”

Jill nodded. She looked like she wanted to say something but turned back to the map. “We can start with the South-East quadrant here. I think we should take a team of six, and place four men here and here, and then scout this area. Should take about five hours.”

“Sounds good.”

Jill frowned at him. “Did you even look?”

Chris stood, looking fiercely down at her. “I said it sounds good. We move out in an hour, tell the men.”

He ignored her gaze burning into his back as he took a strategic retreat from the room. 

\-----

“Okay, all eyes on me. We go in fast, we go in hard. Shoot to kill.”

The four men, plus Jill, sitting in the Humvee with him, nodded. 

“Good. Check your weapons.”

They all ejected their magazines and clipped them back in. Locked and loaded, Chris gestured for them to follow him as the tank slowed to a stop. 

They poured out of the vehicle, checking their surroundings with their scopes. 

“Clear.” Chris wasn’t sure who spoke, but he nodded. He didn’t know their names. Didn’t want to learn, didn’t care. He would get them in and get them out. No attachments, no mess. He would do his job, they would do theirs and then they would go on their way. 

He and Jill took point, kicking in the front doors and entering low into the entrance. After a quick check of the room, and a clear signal Chris told two of them to remain. 

“Keep an eye on our six. Apprehend anyone who comes in. Use deadly force if necessary.” Chris looked at the two soldiers, and Jill, who would follow him. He was glad that Jill was at his side again, so as to at least have one person he trusted completely.

Chris pressed the headset resting in his ear. “Alpha Leader to HQ, two men are guarding the entrance. The rest of us are scouting further ahead.”

“Copy that Alpha.”

“Follow my lead. No heroics today,” Chris said. 

“That’s your job,” Jill said with a laugh. Chris wanted to return her smile, he really did. But there was nothing to smile about. His heroics only ended up killing the people he cared about most. There would be no heroics today. They were here to do a job, and they would do nothing more and nothing less. 

The hallway to their left revealed six different offices, all empty. Chris almost growled as he lowered his weapon in the last room. “Nothing. It all looks normal.”

“But strangely empty for a Tuesday morning.”

Chris nodded. “All right, you two, scout the area, check for anything we missed.” He pressed the headset in his ear. “Alpha Leader to HQ. Offices are clear. We have two soldiers scouring the area. Jill and I will continue further into the building.”

“HQ to Alpha. Copy that.”

The right hallway revealed more offices, and no people. 

“Does it seem a bit small for a research facility to you?” Jill asked. “There are no labs. The computers look brand new, nothing looks touched.”

“Yeah,” Chris said, a horrible feeling sinking in. “Almost like it’s a cover.” He pressed his ear. “Alpha Team, fall back to the entrance, do not touch anything.”

Eerie silence answered him. Chris pressed harder into his ear. “Alpha team, respond.”

He shared a worried look with Jill and they headed back towards the entrance. As they reached the door to the room solid steel bars fell into place, trapping them in. Chris growled and shoved against them. “No!” he yelled. “Not again!”

Jill checked the edges of the door and shook her head at Chris. They glanced at each other and, with weapons held high, sank back into the room to search for a way out.

“I don’t hear any yelling and we aren’t that far from the entrance,” Jill said. “It doesn’t sound like anything has happened to them. Our comms may have been cut out.”

Chris hoped that was the case but with his luck, he doubted it was that easy. “It doesn’t matter,” Chris said. He couldn’t do this again. “They have a job to do, and so do we. Let’s find a way out of this room and keep searching the building.”

Jill studied him for a long moment and he avoided looking her in the eye as he searched the edges of the office. The panic was edging its way in. It was just like before; he was going to lose his team, lose Jill, lose Piers, lose everything. He gave himself a mental shake and kept looking around the room. He had to focus. He had a mission to complete, a job to do. There was nothing else, no one else. He had a job to do! 

The office looked normal. The desks, computers and chairs, all normal. Giving them a further study revealed that they were all fake. The computers weren’t real, the desks were foam covered with some kind of vinyl. Even the pictures on the walls weren’t real. 

“What is going on here?” Jill murmured as she ran her hand across a wall. 

Chris looked over the bookshelf in the far corner, checking to see if any of the books were real, or different in some way. “More importantly,” he said, “what is the cover for? There must be something here, we need to find it.”

“We need to make sure the team is okay,” Jill said.

“They’re trained for this. We are going to finish our mission, understand?” He was going to finish the job they had been sent to do. Getting involved, or going above and beyond only got more people killed. If they were left alone they would survive; they were trained to survive. And they would, without his interference. 

She looked like she wanted to argue but a swift look from Chris and she closed her mouth. 

“Here,” Chris said. There was a small latch underneath one of the desks. Chris shoved the desk aside with a push and it crippled under the pressure and crashed to the floor. He kicked them out of the way, knelt to the floor and grabbed the latch. As luck would have it, it wasn’t locked.

He looked up at Jill as he flung the door open. “Shall we?”

Chris couldn’t help the feeling of dread crawling down his spine as they descended below.


	3. Chapter 3

Whatever had happened down there, the power wasn’t working. Jill and Chris flicked the lights on their scopes on as they walked through a narrow stone hallway. The scenery was a vast cry from the perfection of the upstairs offices. It was dark, dank and Chris could hear water dripping in the distance.

“Cosy,” Jill said. 

Chris snorted.

Something shuffled ahead of them and they turned their weapons to the noise. They couldn’t see anything but it looked like the hallway stopped a few feet ahead of them and turned off in two directions. 

They each checked a side as they reached the end, but it just looked like more endless hallways. The noise they had heard wasn’t visible. They shared a look. 

“Split up?” 

Chris frowned. He really didn’t like the idea of splitting up, but it would cover more ground more efficiently. 

He shook his head. “No, let’s go left.” 

Jill nodded. 

Chris took point and they continued up the dark corridor. 

He tried multiple times to contact the rest of the team, or HQ, but nothing was getting through. 

They found a door further down, though the hallway continued on. Chris gestured to Jill, who stood with her back against the wall next to the door. As Chris flung the door open Jill moved in, weapon at the ready. She fired one shot directly to the forehead and the zombie fell to the ground before it had even had a chance to move. 

“Fuck,” Chris growled, as they entered. Zombies meant a virus. But not just a virus: a virus outbreak. They quickly checked the room but it had just been the one. The room looked like it might have been a living area. There was a cot set up in the corner, as well as a toilet and a desk stacked high with papers and a laptop half open. Was it a room, or a prison? 

Chris knelt next to the zombie and checked the clothes. Jeans and a t-shirt; nothing to indicate who they were or what they were doing in the facility, or in the room. 

“Look at this,” Jill murmured. Chris stood and joined her at the desk. The papers scattered looked like equations, and notes. Chris picked one up and read it. 

_‘The patient seems to be alert, and aware, despite the mass amounts of virus through their body. The virus becomes unstable when the patient is angry, or trying to get out. I suggested we lock it up tighter, use harsher methods but the scientists won’t listen to me. They don’t understand the breakthrough we have here. The patient has retained all memories, all their facilities, everything. They are just like us, completely human at the core, but stronger, faster and … well, the cosmetics could use a little work. They aren’t going to blend in this way. But the-’_

The words started to blur and fade. Something must have been spilled on it.

“That’s crazy,” Jill said. “Someone being infected and taken over but still being them? It’s not possible.” 

Chris shoved the paper away. “We need to find it and kill it.” 

Jill nodded and checked over her weapon. “Agreed, let’s go.” 

\---

They found another three zombies on their way down the hallway. They were clearly scientists working in the facility as they were wearing lab coats.

“Do you think that their ‘subject’ is the one that infected them?” Jill asked, as they searched the bodies for any useful keys or cards.

Chris shrugged. Who knew what kind of new virus they had cooked up in this lab? He was so tired of always being two steps behind and playing catch up with whatever new monsters scientists created. The idea of speeding up evolution was ridiculous and he would have thought after everything that had happened that they would have learnt their lesson. 

The scenery drastically changed after a few more corners. The stone changed to dark wooden walls and the floor changed to red carpet. The hallway expanded into a large room that looked like a foyer. A desk was at the far end of the room, and two lush couches sat in the centre of the room, a coffee table between them. Jill walked over and picked up one of the magazines. She held it up to him and he raised a brow. Women’s Weekly? 

“It looks almost normal,” Jill said.

“In a creepy doctor’s office kind of way,” Chris said. 

Their weapons flew up at the sound of a screeched yell. It sounded horrific and painful. 

“What the hell was that?” Jill breathed.

“Stay here; I’ll go check it out.” 

“Do you think that’s wise?”

Chris nodded to the computer at the desk. “See if you can find any useful information about the facility. I won’t engage if I don’t have to.” 

“Okay.” 

In the next room Chris found another two zombies, but nothing that would have made that god-awful noise. He heard it again to his right and if he strained his ears he could also hear a constant thumping.

He moved into a white room that looked eerily like a mental institution: cold and lifeless. The noise was clear as a bell in the next room though, making Chris think that the room must have been sound-proofed. 

It was coming from the room directly to his right. A single door with a window seemed to be the only entrance. A zombie was loitering near it. 

A single shot to the head brought the infected scientist to an abrupt halt. 

He peered into the room the noise was coming from, and dropped his weapon. He pressed against the door, his hands pushing against the glass. 

“Piers!” he yelled. He was standing at the far end of the room, his back turned, but Chris would have recognised him anywhere. His right arm was still a mess of mutations, and he imagined his face was probably just as bad, but it was definitely him. In fact, it looked like he was still wearing his BSAA uniform from twelve months ago. 

Chris’ heart was racing a million miles an hour and he could already feel the sweat gathering in his hands. He desperately tried to get the door open, but it was locked. A quick glance around the room revealed nothing that might be able to open it. “Piers, can you hear me?” Chris yelled. He banged on the glass, trying to get his attention. But Piers kept rhythmically banging his head against the padded room. What was he trying to do? 

He lifted his head and let out the piercing scream he and Jill had first heard in the entrance. God, it had been Piers. How long had he been stuck in here? Was he the patient they had read about? Had they been using him as a test subject?

Chris glanced at the dead zombie at his feet. They were lucky they were already dead. 

Piers backed up a few steps and ran head first into the wall. He let out another wail and hit the wall with his mutated arm. 

Chris banged on the glass again, over and over. He tried to shove the door with his shoulder, and then kicked it. 

He growled in frustration. Fuck, how did he get it open? What was Piers doing in there? Why couldn’t he hear him? He had to get him out. _He had to get him out._

“Piers!” 

Two zombies ambled into the room, drawn by the noise. With an angry cry Chris moved upon them, giving one a swift kick to the middle and punching the other between the eyes. They staggered, and then kept coming. Chris kept hitting them, over and over again, letting them get back up, never doing enough damage to put them down permanently. 

Two shots fired from the entrance and they fell. Chris yelled out and fell to the ground, still hitting their lifeless bodies. He couldn’t stop, even when he felt two small hands try to lift him.

“Chris, what the hell is wrong with you?” 

Chris turned to see Jill leaning over him, a worried expression on her face. “Chris? You with me?” 

Chris nodded and stood, ignoring the blood streaming down his hands from the zombies. Jill checked him over, using a water bottle to make sure that he hadn’t been scratched or bitten. He pulled away after a minute.

“I’m fine. We need to get this door opened.” 

“Is the creature in there?” Jill asked.

“He’s not a creature!” Chris snarled. Jill stepped back, surprised at his outburst. With furrowed brows she walked over to the door, stepping over his weapon, and looked in. Her mouth dropped open.

“Oh my god.”

“Get him out, _please_ ,” Chris said, hating how his voice broke. 

Jill slung her weapon over her shoulder and grabbed something out of a front pocket. C4. Fuck, why hadn’t he thought of that? 

“Wait,” Chris said, “Will that hurt him?” 

Jill glanced to where Piers was still trying to bury his head in the wall. He seemed to have no recognition of his surroundings.

“I think at this point not a lot would hurt him anyway, but he’s far enough away that he won’t get caught in the blast.” 

Satisfied, Chris nodded for her to start. She attached the C4 to the top and bottom of the door. She looked at Chris as they moved to the opposite side of the room.

“Are you sure about this? What if they’re wrong and it’s not…him?” 

“We’re taking him home.” 

“But, Chri-”

“ _We’re taking him home._ ” 

She nodded reluctantly and blasted the door open. 

Jill had her weapon raised as they entered and Chris shoved it to face the floor, even as Jill growled at him. “Do not fucking shoot, soldier,” he snarled. 

Her jaw ticked, but she said, “Yes, Sir,” and kept her weapon down. 

They approached slowly, though Piers seemed oblivious anyway. It was almost as though he hadn’t even realised his prison had been broken into.

He was still turned away from them, banging his head against the wall. The closer they were the more Chris realised that the impact on the wall from Piers’ head would probably have killed a normal person. 

Chris moved his hand to reach out and touch Piers’ shoulder but Jill grabbed it. Chris glared at her and tugged his hand away. 

“Chris,” she hissed. 

The noise seemed to draw a reaction from Piers. He tensed, and turned to slowly face them. Chris swallowed hard as he looked upon Piers’ face for the first time since that horrible morning of July.

It was exactly as he remembered it in his dreams. His right eye was glassy, and horribly infected. A third eye was almost peeking out of his forehead and jagged scars pulsed down his right cheek and the side of his neck, moving into his arm. 

Piers stared in horror at them. “Cap-tain?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologise if a sentence doesn’t make sense, or there are grammar errors. I haven’t really done any editing; I’m just excited about the story and want to get it written out. 


	4. Chapter 4

Chris moved forward. “It’s me, Piers. It’s okay.” 

Piers shook his head and moved back. “No. No! You can’t be here!” he moved back again and turned violently to the wall, ramming his head straight into it.

“No!” Chris yelled. He shoved forward, ignoring Jill’s concerned cry, and grabbed Piers around the shoulders. He felt one of the jagged edges of Piers’ arm slice into him, but he didn’t care. He held on and tried to stop his from moving, from hurting himself. “Stop!” 

Piers wasn’t listening. He shoved Chris away so hard that he was flung against the opposite wall. 

“Chris!” Jill raised her weapon, ready to fire on Piers.

“Don’t shoot!” Chris yelled. “Stand down!”

Piers glanced between them, looking scared. His eyes were scared and unpredictable, so unlike the Piers that Chris knew.

“He’s going to kill us!” 

“Stand down!”

Piers let out a wail. It was identical to the first one they had heard. Jill looked like she was seconds away from pulling the trigger and Chris tried to stand. He stumbled under the weight of his foot, pain shooting up his leg. Fuck! 

“Jill, stop!” 

Chris fell back to the ground. 

“Captain!” Piers moved and Jill shot, narrowly missing Piers’ head. 

“Get away from him!” Jill yelled. 

Piers tried to steady Chris as he frantically tried to stand. 

“I’m okay,” Chris said to Piers as he gripped onto Piers arm to steady himself. “I’m okay.” He kept the weight off the foot that was radiating the pain. He wasn’t sure he wanted to look down. 

“You shouldn’t be here,” Piers said. 

“Move away! Now!” 

Piers glanced at Jill but didn’t move. 

“You need to leave,” Piers said.

“I’m not leaving without you,” Chris growled. 

Piers shook his head. “I’m not always in control. You have to leave here without me. Before they come.” 

“Before who comes?” Jill demanded. 

Chris grabbed the sides of Piers head and brought him in close. “I am not leaving without you.” 

Jill spun to the entrance, her weapon held high. “What was that noise?” 

“There were over 250 staff at this facility and now they’re all dead. What do you think is out there?” Piers said. 

Jill glanced back horrified. “Chris, we need to leave. Now.” 

“I can’t walk. We’ll never make it out before they reach us.” 

Jill shoved Piers out of the way and flung one of Chris’s arms over her shoulder. “We’re both getting out of here.” 

“You can’t fire your weapon efficiently like that,” Piers said. He looked between them, pain evident in his face. “I’ll take Chris, you take point.” 

Jill hesitated, obviously weighing up her options. With a sigh she said, “Okay.” 

Chris groaned as Jill handed him over to Piers, who absorbed most of his weight. 

“If you harm one hair on him, I will hunt you down and kill you, do you understand?” 

“I understand,” Piers said. 

“Just because you don’t want to harm him, doesn’t mean you won’t. You just broke his ankle; the nature of your virus isn’t peaceful.” 

“Can we maybe get out of here?” Chris said between them. 

Jill began to fire immediately as they moved slowly out of the room. Zombies were coming from the other two doorways in the room. Chris knew that it wasn’t going to be enough. Just her firing wasn’t going to be enough. He pulled his nine-oh-nine out of his pocket and shot as many as he could, his aim shakier than he would have liked. 

“You’re never going to make it out of here like this,” Piers said. “Take the Captain,” he told Jill. As soon as his burden was lifted he raised his arm and, with a cry, electricity began to break free, moving quickly across the room and scorching anything in its path.

Jill hovered over Chris, protecting him from the blast. 

“This way,” Piers yelled. Jill pulled Chris along to where Piers was telling them but they were too slow, and the zombies were beginning to gather again. Chris had too much weight on him for her to carry capably. 

“Cover us,” Piers said and took over holding the Captain. 

Once they were clear of the room Jill slammed the door shut, trapping the zombies inside. The few remaining in the hallway were quickly taken care of. 

“They aren’t the only ones,” Piers said. “You need to get out of here.” 

“Not without you,” Chris said. 

“Chris isn’t leaving here without you, and you know it. So let’s get out of here. Which way?” 

“You’re asking me?” 

“You don’t know?” Jill asked incredulously.

“Does it look like I was being allowed to roam like a guest?” Piers snapped. He groaned as his arm began to pulse. 

“Stay calm,” Chris said. He ran a hand up and down Piers human arm, trying to soothe the beast.

Piers took a deep breath, and looked away. 

Jill narrowed her eyes at him. “What happens you get angry?” she asked.

“Nothing good.” 

“Let’s just keep going, okay?” Chris said. “You can bicker when we get out of here.” 

They continued down the hall until they found what looked like a control room. Screens showed multiple cameras in the facility, and recorded images of Piers in his cell. Chris assumed they were recorded, since Piers was no longer there and the room being showed was intact. 

Piers lowered Chris onto a chair and Jill began pressing buttons on the consoles. 

“How long did they keep you here for?” Chris asked.

Piers looked away. “I don’t know. A couple of months. They had me in a stasis pod for a while, healing from the underwater facility. I thought I was dead, but they managed to find a way to make my mutations heal and restore my crushed organs.” 

“I’m so sorry, Piers.” 

“You have nothing to be sorry for, Captain. They weren’t supposed to find me, it wasn’t supposed to be like this.” 

“We’re going to fix this, Piers. I swear to you.” 

“I'd like to know why you're so in control considering how long you've been infected. But first we have to survive,” Jill said. She gestured at the screens. “I’ve worked out that we’re on the first floor. Upstairs is considered ground level. So the good news is that out isn’t that far away. The bad news is that our only way there is blocked.” 

“So what are our options?” Chris asked. 

“There’s an escape tunnel that we can use, if it’s not overrun. But it’s on the sixth floor.” 

“Since ground is up, six is five floors down, right?” Piers said. 

Jill nodded. “Right.” 

“So we go down,” Chris said. 

“There’s another way,” Piers said. “A way that doesn’t involve going further into the belly of the beast.” 

“No.”

Piers glared at Chris. “You don’t even know what I was going to say.” 

“You’ve already pulled the stupid martyr act on me once, I’m not letting you do it again.” 

“Bu-”

“We go down,” Chris said. He stood and Piers was at his side instantly, helping to steady him. 

“The only problem we have is your ankle,” Jill said. “It’s going to make it hard to move.” 

“Is there a med bay anywhere on this floor?” Piers asked. 

“No, but there is one on the second floor,” Jill said, pointing to the map she had located on the screen. 

“We go there first,” Piers said. 

Chris looked over the screens. There were zombies in almost every camera angle. Some of them were few, others were packed tightly together, just waiting for their chance to ambush someone unlucky enough to get within their grasp. It was going to be a shit fight to get out. 

“Agreed,” Jill said. She checked over her weapon, and the extra ammunition on her belt. 

“I thought I was in charge here,” Chris said. 

“Of course you are,” Jill said. 

Chris rolled his eyes. “How much ammo do we have?” 

“We’ll make do.” 

Piers gripped onto Chris tightly. “Let’s go, Captain.”


	5. Chapter 5

Chris looked at the set of stairs in horror. How the hell was he going to get down those without breaking something else? 

“They don’t have elevators here?” 

“I couldn’t see any from the control room,” Jill said.

Chris frowned. “What kind of stupid facility doesn’t have elevators?” 

Jill shook her head with a smile. “Come on big guy, you can do it.” 

“That’s easy for you to say, you’re not lugging my big carcass around,” Chris said, giving a pointed look at Piers. 

“I don’t mind, Captain.” 

Jill moved back and double checked the passage they had come from. She locked the door and gave it a nudge. “It’s secure. I’ll go first, and clear the way.” 

“We’re right behind you,” Piers said. He secured his good arm around Chris and, once Jill had descended, they began their slow trek. 

“What did they do to you in here?” 

“I don’t know; they sedated me with some kind of gas whenever they wanted to come into the room. I never even saw another person while I was in there.” 

Chris’s gut clenched in anger, wishing he could kill every one of the bastards. Knowing they were all zombies now did nothing to abate his anger. This wasn’t justice, it wasn’t enough. He needed to do _more_ , make them suffer for eternity. 

All that time that he could have been helping Piers, and instead he had been stuck here being experimented on like a fucking lab rat. 

They stopped to rest after the first flight of stairs. Chris leant back against the wall, feeling exhausted. Walking around with a broken ankle was more tiring than he thought it would be and he felt useless. 

Piers knelt down and checked his ankle over. He had his mutated arm twisted, as though he was trying to hide it from view. As if he could ever shield something that big from sight. 

Chris placed his hand deliberately on Piers bad shoulder. Piers jumped, and looked up with startled eyes. 

“You have nothing to be ashamed of,” Chris said. “You did a good thing, remember? You saved my life, _twice_. I can’t be ashamed of that, and neither should you.” 

Piers looked like he wanted to argue, but then he nodded and placed Chris’s foot back on the ground gently. 

By the time they got to the bottom of the stairs Chris was coated in sweat. Piers, however, looked none the worse for wear. “Whatever you’re taking, I want some,” Chris joked. 

“That’s not funny, Captain.” 

“It is a little,” Chris mumbled, as Piers pulled their bodies back together and they continued to the door where Jill was waiting. 

“The infirmary should be through this door; one left, and two rights,” Jill said. “How are you holding up, Chris?” 

“I wouldn’t mind some drugs right now,” he said. 

“The Legendary Chris Redfield, taking Panadol?” she asked, with a laugh. 

“Was thinking something a bit stronger,” Chris mumbled. He felt strange; a bit hot and fuzzy. What had they been talking about? He stumbled as Piers walked him across the platform and they almost fell into the wall. Piers held him and looked at him with concern. 

“He’s starting to get a fever,” Piers said. 

Chris grabbed Piers jacket and Piers looked at him, a question in his eye…eyes? “There are three,” he said.

“Sir?” 

“You have three eyes.” 

Piers looked away and didn’t reply. Chris could see his jaw twitch. Was he clenching his teeth? 

“What’s wrong with him?” Jill said. Wrong with who? Why was Jill turning a strange shade of red? Weird… Piers was turning a shade of blue though, and he found he really _really_ liked it. He didn’t like that Piers wasn’t looking at him.

Chris grabbed Piers face and locked their eyes together. “They’re still pretty.” He needed Piers to know that. To know that when he looked at his face he didn’t see _damage_ , he didn’t see an _infection_ , he saw Piers. Pure Piers, who was the best person he had ever met. A little ornery, and quick to temper, but a good person down to his core. It was half the reason he had recruited the young man, along with his ridiculously amazing talent with a sniper. Like, _fuck_ , wow. 

\----

Did Chris just…? Piers glanced at Jill, panic in his eyes. “Did you come into contact with anything before you found me?” 

Jill shook her head. “Not that I know of, and we were together the whole time. We need to get him to the infirmary, yesterday.” She moved to open the door and jumped back when something heavy knocked into it. She frowned and pressed her ear up against it. 

“Zombies. I can’t tell how many. They’re lingering so they know we’re here.” 

“What are our options?” Piers asked. He tried to stop Chris from grabbing at his face and his chest but with only one good hand it was incredibly difficult. For a large stocky guy he sure had spaghetti arms.

Chris made a happy humming noise as he latched on and buried his face in Piers neck. Piers was just thankful it was on the good side, and not that mutated one. 

“This isn’t normal,” Jill said. “A broken bone wouldn’t do this. What is going on?” 

The accusation in her eyes made Piers want to kill something. He could feel the virus flowing through his blood, egging him on. He could see blood, feel it, _taste_ it. It wanted him to hunt and kill. Chris should never have let him out; he should have let him rot in that room and waste away to nothing. He wasn’t a danger to anyone but himself in that room. 

“I don’t know!” he snapped, trying to regain himself. “ _I don’t know_ and we need to get to the infirmary _now_ so pull that door open and let’s deal with these assholes, okay?” 

“We don’t know how many there are, it could be suicide. With Chris in this condition we wouldn’t be able to pull back quick enough. Let’s not even mention the stairs.”

Piers growled in frustration. Chris frowned when his arm started pulsing again. He poked at it with a confused expression. 

Piers grabbed his hand. “Stop that,” he said. Chris pouted and Piers wasn’t sure he had ever seen that expression on his face before. It was disconcerting and scared the hell out of him. What was wrong with him? He had been injected with something? 

“I’ll lead them away.” 

“What? No.” Piers looked at her like she was crazy. Which, she just might be. Lead them away? To where? “There’s no way you can handle that many. And we have no idea what you’ll find in another room.” 

“We don’t actually know how many it is, and what choice do we have? They’re going to get through that door any second now anyway and Chris needs urgent medical attention. We aren’t getting out of here without his help.”

Chris was almost purring against Piers throat. Piers could feel his stubble rubbing against the patch of normal skin. 

“Be careful,” Piers said. “I don’t want to be the one to tell him that I let you go. I know what you mean to Chris.” He had always been hauntingly aware of it. 

“And what he means to me,” Jill said. “I’m trusting him to your care. Don’t make me hunt you down.” 

Piers nodded solemnly. He could feel his third eye moving around. He could see what it saw, but he didn’t have any control over it; it was just another piece of himself that he could no longer control. 

He jumped when he felt a tongue lapping at his throat. He pulled Chris away from him, who looked upset at being taken away from his new lollipop. Piers desperately tried not to think too hard about it. Something was messing the Captain up, badly. “Chris, you need to stay quiet, okay?” 

Chris nodded. Piers shook him slightly.

“Do you understand?” 

“I understand, stop shaking me.” 

Piers hated how uneven Chris’s voice sounded. The sooner they got to the infirmary, the better. 

He pulled Chris alongside him, against the wall beside the door. When Jill flung it open it would hide them from view. Piers just hoped it would be enough to allow the creatures to be distracted by Jill. 

Piers nodded when Jill gave him a questioning look. She took a deep breath, secured her weapon, and flung the door open. Three zombies fell to the ground as she slowly descended the stairs backwards. Piers hoped to god she knew what she was doing because if she slipped and broke her neck she wouldn’t be doing anything but giving the zombies a free meal. 

They followed her obediently and at last they were all out of sight. The sound of gunfire echoing was slightly calming for Piers. If she was firing she was still alive. He wasn’t going to think about what Chris would do to him if Jill didn’t make it out of there alive.


	6. Chapter 6

“Chris!” 

Piers’ back hit the wall hard as the zombie latched onto him, trying to get to any exposed flesh. 

He shoved them away and used his mutated arm to slice the creature in two. Three more swarmed him and he frantically tried to push through as they tried desperately to get their next feed. 

“Chris!” 

Piers heard Chris cry out somewhere to his left and his arm began to pulse, the mutation rippling up and down his right side. With a roar he shoved the zombies away from him. His electricity coursed through them, burning them from the inside out. 

He ignored the slight limp he had acquired from the use of his arm as he cut through more of them, trying to reach Chris. 

If any of them had harmed him the world would burn. 

Chris was fighting off two of them, but his sluggish movements and impaired mental capabilities were clearly having an effect. The sleeve of his military jacket had been ripped off and one of the zombies had latched on, trying to get their teeth into the exposed flesh. The other was on the ground, holding his leg and trying to get a bite through his combat pants. While the material was thick it wouldn’t withstand it for long; the only reason it hadn’t gotten through was probably more to do with the way Chris was wriggling like a worm more than anything. 

Piers pulled the gun he had taken - Chris's spare - from his pants and shot them both point blank in the head. His heart dropped when Chris didn’t move from beneath them. 

“Captain!” 

Chris stared blankly up at him when the zombies had been removed. The only indication he was still alive was his heaving breathing. 

Piers dropped to his knees and shook him. “Chris, are you hurt? Chris!” 

Chris turned his head to the side. “You’re blue.” 

“I’m- what?” 

Chris lifted a hand and cupped Piers mutated cheek. He ran his thumb across the jagged edges gently. Something twisted inside Piers stomach and he shoved the hand away.

“Are you hurt anywhere? Did they get you?” 

“I don’t know…I’m not sure.” 

Getting information out of this Chris was worse than when he was normal, and Piers had never thought that could be possible. He gritted his teeth as he helped the big guy stand. “We need to go before more come.” 

“Where are we going?” 

“To get you help.” 

“Is something wrong with me?” 

Chris stumbled on his feet and Piers tightened his grip and pulled Chris further into him. He began to half drag him as they continued using the directions Jill had given.

“You could say that.” 

“Will I die?” 

Piers propped him up against the wall as he checked around the corners, making sure they wouldn’t be ambushed unexpectedly again. “Not on my watch.” 

The journey was slow, and some of the things that Chris said along the way didn’t make any sense. The ramblings seemed to lean towards the idea that Chris had been drugged in some way. But how, and by who? 

When Piers saw the med bay sign above the door at the end of the hall he almost cried in relief. There had to be something in there that would tell them what the hell was wrong with Chris. Better yet, something to cure him. 

He hoped they’d also pass the labs on their way through so he could find out what these freaks had been doing to him while he had been down here. And then he needed to find a way to keep himself locked inside while Chris and Jill got to safety; he wouldn’t allow them to endanger themselves, or the world, by letting him out. 

“Why did you leave me?” 

Piers frowned as he tried to work out how to get inside the room. A key card, seriously? “What?” 

“You died. And left me all alone. You…you _pushed_ me.” 

It sounded as though Chris was surprised by this revelation, as though he was just remembering. Was there some kind of memory loss associated with whatever drug he had in his system? 

“I did it for you. For the BSAA. It should have ended then.” He should have died, it should have been finished. 

Piers pried his fingers around the key swipe. It looked thicker than it should, maybe there was on override keypad behind it? 

“It never ended for me,” Chris whispered. His voice was so low that Piers almost couldn’t hear him. He was hunched over and he looked like he was in pain. 

Piers did a quick once over to check that he wasn’t injured. 

“It was never going to end for me, that constant agony every day, knowing you weren’t watching my six.” 

“Captain…” 

Chris looked at him, tenderness in his eyes that Piers looked away from. He wasn’t sure he wanted to see this, or hear any of this, knowing that it was a drugs influence. Watching the captains six had been both an honour, and a constant pain in his chest: being that close, but always having that distance between them that Piers could never bridge. He had never tried to close the gap, knowing that everything would end for him. He hadn’t been willing to let it go yet. And then his time had run out. 

“You’re blue,” Chris whispered. Then his eyes rolled into the back of his head and he slumped forward, falling. 

“Captain!” Piers reacted instantly, catching the dead weight in his arms. He lowered Chris to the ground, checking for a pulse. He tensed when he heard the ominous sounds of groaning and shuffling feet ahead of them. They were coming fast, and there were a lot of them.

“God, give me a fucking break you bastards,” Piers growled. He stood and ripped the front of the key swipe away with his mutated hand. Finally, luck smiled down on him and a shiny keypad stared at him from underneath. 

Until he remembered the fact that he didn’t know the code. He pressed a few different combinations, cringing at the loud beep that sounded every time he guessed wrong. 

The sounds of hungry creatures were getting closer and Piers good hand clenched against the keypad. He worked fine under pressure but this was ridiculous. There was no way he had enough time to try all possible combinations. 

The first zombie appeared around the corner and Piers shot him. He was thankful that his mutation hadn’t affected his eyesight and, despite the third eye, he was still an expert marksman. 

He glanced at the door as he continued to shoot as more came towards them. If he broke it open they may not be able to close it. If they backtracked they may not be able to get back, and he would have to carry Chris. 

The nine-oh-nine clicked as Piers emptied the last round. He shoved it into the hem of his pants, feeling frustrated. He didn’t think he had enough life energy to take all of them on just using his electricity. If he fell Chris would be a sitting duck. 

Something glinted from the jacket of the first zombie that Piers had shot. _You have got to be kidding me_ , he thought incredulously. A key card, _right there_? He thought he had been the king of ‘so near, yet so far’ but this took the cake. 

Piers raised his eyes to the ceiling and said a silent prayer. He wasn’t religious but he probably needed some divine intervention for this shit. 

“Fire in the hall!” 

Piers dropped to the floor and covered Chris’s body. Who the hell was that?


	7. Chapter 7

Piers teeth rattled as the explosion rocked the area. 

A zombie began to crawl from beneath the pile of bodies and slink towards where Piers was protecting Chris. Before he could do anything a figure came around the corner and shot it in the head. 

“Here comes the rescue squad,” the figure said, with a large grin on his face. 

Piers squinted, trying to work out where he knew them from. Another guy came from behind him, but his head was down as he fiddled on some kind of touch pad. 

“You look like shit, man.” 

Piers ignored them and checked Chris over. He was still out cold. His face was getting clammy, and he was losing colour. 

“Is that Redfield? What happened?” 

“Nice arm,” the second guy with the touch pad said, “Very 1980s horror film.” 

“Definitely not for your PG ratings.” 

Piers looked between them. They were wearing BSAA uniforms but he still couldn’t place them. “Who are you?” 

The first man raised his hand. “Keith Lumley. And you must be Piers Nivans. We thought you were dead so you know: felicitations on being not, or whatever.” 

Keith Lumley… “The Director of the East African Branch…what the hell are you doing here?” 

“We like to get in on the action,” Keith said. “Yo Quint, come do your thing.” 

“Hold your horses; I’m getting an image of the schematics, and doing some thermal testing.”

“Thermal testing?” Keith asked.

“So we can see if there’s anyone in there?” Quint looked at Keith like he was an idiot. 

“Would a zombie even show up on that thing? They’re dead. Besides, if there is I’ll just shoot ‘em.” 

Keith helped Piers lift Chris up as Quint fiddled with the keypad at the door. 

“Who ripped the front off this?” Quint asked.

Piers glanced at him as he slung Chris’s arm over his shoulder. Between Piers and Keith, Chris was staying upright okay, but they needed to find somewhere to put him, fast. “That was me.” Had he screwed something up? 

“Nice and clean; good job.” 

“Can we get inside before nasties come? I’m sick of saving your ass while you fiddle with your girlfriends.” 

“You’re the one who invited me here, remember?” 

“If you could hurry up,” Piers said with gritted teeth. 

“Everyone’s a critic,” Quint said.

A zombie moved around the corner, followed by three more. And then more.

“Where do these assholes keep coming from?” Keith said as he fired off a few rounds. “Quint, seriously, now would be good.” 

“Okay, we’re in.” 

They quickly moved through the door and slammed it shut. Quint fiddled with another keypad beside the door and the light above it went red and they heard a mechanism click in the door. “That should keep anything out.” 

“Meanwhile, we’re stuck in here,” Keith said. 

“Old men need their rest.” 

“Oh, that was clever. Been practising your quips with all the free time you spend alone?” 

Keith helped Piers move Chris to the bed in the middle of the room and they laid him out on it. Quint moved to the computer in the room and started typing on the keyboard. 

“So, what happened to him? And where’s Jill?” Keith asked. 

“We don’t know, on both counts,” Piers said. He used his good hand to pat Chris over, checking for any open wounds. He froze when he felt a wet patch on the inside of his arm. He straightened it so he could get a better look. 

There was a small tear, barely enough to fit a finger, close to his armpit. Piers wasn’t sure when he had gotten it, but blood was coming through the tear. How had they not noticed that before? Why hadn’t Chris said anything? 

“Help me get his shirt off.” 

“I thought I was kinky,” Quint said. 

“You are kinky Mr. Techno,” Keith said. They made quick work of Chris’s shirt and Piers took a better look at the cut. 

“What the fuck is that?” 

Piers shook his head. He’d never seen a cut like that. It was still bleeding, but it was also oozing some kind of blue liquid. He moved his good hand to touch it and jumped as an electric current zapped him. 

“Electricity?” he murmured.

“Like your arm,” Keith said. “I saw some vids upstairs; that thing packs a major punch.” 

“It’s like you were starring in your very own Tekken.” 

“Get a life Quint.” 

“When you stop invading it, Grinder.” 

Keith grinned. “The guy loves me. So, what’s up with his arm? Is he turning into you?” Piers frowned, though Keith hadn’t sounded like he was trying to insult anyone. 

“We could have our own army of super mutants,” Quint said. Piers looked between them. Were these guys for real? This was the leader of an entire BSAA Branch? 

“No, I mutated almost instantly. He’s been funny, like he’s been drugged, for at least an hour now.” He didn’t understand why the two men weren’t more freaked out by Piers appearance, or wary like Jill had been. 

“Guys, come look at this.” 

Piers hesitated, not wanting to leave Chris’s side. 

“He’ll be fine for a sec,” Keith said, and they both went over to the computer Quint was playing with.

There was an analysis of a stretched out body on the screen. The insides were visible and information was crossing the screen, with information about the various areas on the body.

“Is that me?” 

“Looks like it. See the right arm? There’s a clear mutation from the size of it alone, but all the veins and muscles are bunched together as well and the amount of electricity flowing through that thing is lethal.” Quint turned to look at him. “How are you not killing  
people when they touch you?” 

“Focus,” Keith said.

“Right. So, there’s also a list of chemicals here that they’ve injected you with. One in particular has caught my eye.” 

Piers tried to read what the screen said but Quint was moving through different screens too fast.

“It’s a mix of different viruses, including the T virus, plus a pheromone.” 

“A pheromone?”

“I’m a bit more concerned about the T virus part,” Keith said. “Is he contagious?”

“Well according to the data they compiled – and wow have they been juicing you, man – none of the viruses are taking. It’s almost like whatever you injected yourself with is making you immune to everything else.” 

“That didn’t answer my question.” 

“He doesn’t have the T Virus in him so obviously no he’s not, genius. At least not to that particular strain. As for the virus that’s causing his mutations, I can’t say. They aren’t reacting like any virus I’ve seen, and Chris isn’t reacting to whatever the hell he’s got  
in the same way either. The electricity suggests it _does_ have something to do with Nivans.” 

“So…” 

“At this stage I think it’s okay to say we have no idea.” 

“I’m right here,” Piers said, feeling irritated. He gritted his teeth as he tried to stop his arm from reacting to the frustration echoing through him. 

“And the pheromone?” Keith asked. 

“Hmm…not sure about that one. Doesn’t seem to be anything related to it. Though it says ‘check the further studies file’. Maybe there’s more around here somewhere?” 

“You find it, we’ll bandage the Captain up,” Keith said. 

“Bandaging him isn’t going to fix anything,” Piers said. “Does any of that shit tell you what the hell is wrong with him?” 

“We’ll fix him, don’t worry.” 

Piers wished he had their kind of confidence, he really did. But one look at Chris’s still body on the bed and he knew they were running out of time. Whatever was affecting Chris was starting to drain him, and it was draining him fast.


	8. Chapter 8

Piers could feel his nerves reaching breaking point as he listened to Quint’s tapping on the keyboard.

Chris was still unconscious, his injured arm now clean and bandaged. They hadn’t put his shirt back on and Piers pointedly kept his gaze from moving below neck level. 

He glanced to where Keith was rummaging through what looked like medical supplies. Every now and again he would make a noise and pocket something. Piers didn’t really care what he was doing. 

“Can we use the radio to signal someone outside the facility?” Piers asked, gesturing to the machine next to Quint. Quint shook his head.

“Internal only.” 

“So,” Keith said, “you tried to see what that baby can do yet?” 

Piers frowned. “What?” 

Keith gestured with his head. “That arm of yours.” 

“It’s a mutation.” 

Keith rolled his eyes. “I know what it is, that’s not what I asked.” 

“The potential damage is pretty amazing,” Quint said. He looked over his shoulder at them. “It pulses every now and again, I don’t know if you noticed. But it seems like all your mental functions are still fully capable so that could mean there’s a lot more possibilities for your virus to adapt positively, you know?” 

“No, I don’t know,” Piers growled. 

“He means you should put that thing to use and see what it could do.” 

“It’s not a weapon, it’s a mutation,” Piers said. “It isn’t for _utilizing_ , it’s for destroying. My virus isn’t something to play with, what the hell is wrong with you?” 

“Calm down soldier,” Keith said. “We don’t mean for you to be used as some kind of experimentation; I think you’ve had more than enough of that down here. But if you want to get back into the BSAA you gotta use what you have at your disposal, yeah?” 

_Get back in the BSAA?_ Were they crazy? “There’s no way I could ever be an operative again. The only thing I can hope for is a clean death.” 

“That’s kind of morbid,” Quint said. “They let Jill back in.” 

“Jill wasn’t a mutated monster,” Piers snapped. He could feel the pulsing again, and he could feel his blood heating as it pumped through his body. He was a monster; he needed to be put down. They were going to leave him down here to rot: he would make sure of it. 

“But she _did_ kill a lot of people,” Keith said. “And we still love her.” 

“I’m not talking about this.” Piers dropped his gaze to Chris, and almost jumped out of his skin. Brown eyes were staring up at him. They blinked twice, and then Chris tried to sit up. Piers jolted forward and pressed a hand against his chest.

“Stay down, Captain.” 

“What happened, Piers?” His eyes moved around the room, looking bright and alert. They didn’t have that same grogginess that had been apparent earlier. “Keith? Quint? What are you two doing here?” 

“Hey, good to see you awake Captain,” Keith said. Quint just waved from where he was still going through files on the computer. 

“What’s going on?” 

“We thought you’d be able to tell us. How are you feeling?” 

Chris looked confused. “Fine?” 

“You sure?” 

“Am I sure I’m fine?” He looked at Piers, almost as though wanting clarification that’s what he had just been asked. His eyes widened when he looked down at Piers arm. He reared back and almost fell from the bed. “Christ, Piers, what happened?” 

“Sir?” 

Piers looked at Quint and Keith for explanation. Quint had stopped typing and was watching the Captain warily. 

“Chris?” Keith moved forward slowly, his arms stretched out in front of him. “Are you okay?” 

“Stop asking me if I’m okay! What’s wrong with Piers!?” 

“Nothing is wrong with him,” Keith said. “He’s fully functional, still the man you know.” 

Chris’s eyes kept flicking between them, as though he were unsure who to focus on. “You got infected. How? Who was watching your six? No one leaves rookies alone, they know better! ” 

There was a pause, and the silence in the air crackled until Keith broke it. 

“It’s more complicated than that,” he said. “You don’t remember?” 

“Rookie?” Piers murmured. Christ, he hadn’t been a rookie for years. What the hell was going on? 

“Remember what?” Chris was starting to sound angry and frustrated. His arms flexed as he grabbed hold of the edges of the bed. 

The radio equipment beside Quint crackled to life and Jill’s voice came over. “Captain, this is Jill. Did you make it to the infirmary? Over.” 

Chris bolted to the radio so fast Piers almost caught whiplash. “Jill? Jill! Where are you? They let you out already? Why didn’t someone tell me?” 

“Let me out of where? Is Nivans still with you?”

“The recruit? Yeah, he’s here. Something happened to him, he’s been infected. What is going on?” 

“I think maybe you should be telling me that. Put Nivans on.” 

With a confused, and concerned, look, Chris stepped away so Piers could move forward.

“I’m here,” Piers said. He glanced over as Keith pulled Chris away and began talking to him quietly in the far corner of the room.

“What’s happened?” 

“We aren’t sure. He lost consciousness and then he woke up like this. He has a scratch on his arm that suggests he’s been infected but it’s not like any normal infection I’ve seen.” 

“Shit. Wait, who’s we?”

“It seems like he’s having some sort of memory loss,” Quint said. “He remembers Lieutenant Piers, but as a new recruit, not as his second in command.” 

“Quint? What are you doing in the facility?” 

“The East African Branch has been monitoring this place for some time now, black-ops kind of stuff that Keith has been keeping pretty hush hush. When we heard Alpha Team was being sent in we decided to take our investigation a step further.” 

“You’ve been monitoring this place?” Piers said. “Did you know I was in here?” 

“Today is the first time we’ve learnt anything about this facility. We knew it was Neo-Umbrella and we knew they were doing something big but they hid it well and we couldn’t get a foot in without stepping wrong.” 

Piers felt it the second Chris lost consciousness again and Quint grabbed him as he almost fell when the electricity inside him pulled. He shook his head and looked over to where Keith was laying Chris back down.

“You felt that,” Quint said. “When Chris fell it did something to you.” 

Piers wanted to deny it; this circus act was getting weird, even for them. 

“So according to Chris,” Keith said, joining them, “It’s 2010, Jill is in the BSAA holding facility undergoing testing after her stint with Wesker, and Piers Nivans is his newest recruit, fresh from the US Army Special Forces. In fact, Piers isn’t even a member of his team yet, let alone the ATL.” 

“I don’t understand,” Jill said. “What kind of virus would cause that?” 

“Nivans has a special kind and it looks like he’s just spreading it around and creating his own personal strain.” 

“You infected him?” Jill growled. “I trusted you with him!” 

“I don’t know how, or when, it happened,” Piers said. “You can kill me once we work out how to cure him.” 

“What makes you think there’s a cure?” Jill said.

“Everything has a cure,” Quint said. He resumed typing away at the keyboard, the screens moving rapidly. “Just because it hasn’t been manufactured yet doesn’t mean there isn’t one.” 

“Real reassuring. Put it on the next birthday card,” Keith said.

“What do you think is in the facility?” Jill asked. “You’re a Director, so this must be important.” 

“Maybe I just miss being in the field.” 

“Maybe you’re full of shit,” Jill said. 

“Okay, I’ve uploaded all the information to our database. But it keeps referring to a ‘further studies file’ that I can’t locate,” Quint said.

“It could be in a different room,” Piers said. “A facility this big has to have more than one med room. Or it could be in the labs, there must be labs here somewhere.” 

“On the fourth floor,” Keith said. “We passed it on our way up.” 

“How did you get in?” Jill asked.

“The underwater facility had a backdoor, an area that wasn’t destroyed last year. It’s hidden under the bottom of the ocean, and leads directly to this facility.” 

“That explains how they managed to get Nivans without anyone realising what had happened,” Jill said. 

Piers clenched his fists, trying to calm the anger ebbing deep within him. Who gave a fuck about any of that? Their primary objective should have been to help Chris. He didn’t care what the scientists were doing, what the facility was for, even what they had been doing to him. He needed to get Chris to safety and to get him back to normal, end of story. 

Jill let them know she would head to the labs on the fourth floor and meet them there. Keith turned to Piers when she signed off.

“Okay, so what’s the plan?” 

“Aren’t you supposed to be in charge?” Piers said, frowning.

“You’re the one that’s been stuck here for over six months,” Keith pointed out. 

“Stuck being the operative word; I was never let out of my cell.” 

“Here,” Quint said, shoving a small device into Piers good hand. “This has the schematics of the facility, with some key locations highlighted. There’s a lab on the fourth floor, and that’s where you need to be heading. See if you can find out some more information about the missing files that we keep getting referred to.” 

Piers looked between them. “What are you going to be doing?” 

“We’re looking for something,” Keith said vaguely. Piers narrowed his eyes but they didn’t elaborate. “You rendezvous with Jill and we’ll meet you on the sixth floor escape hatch in two hours. Copy?” 

Piers nodded reluctantly. “Copy.” 

“It might be best if you left Chris here,” Keith said quietly. 

“Excuse me?” 

Keith and Quint looked down at his arm. Piers didn’t need to look: he already knew it was throbbing, and he could feel it mutating further. It seemed to fluctuate between a small appendage and a large one, depending on his mood. He could feel the poison pumping through his blood, urging him to destroy anyone who tried to hurt Chris. 

“He’s not conscious right now and even if he was, he’s not exactly in the greatest state of mind. Keeping him here would be for his safety,” Quint said. “Out there he’s a liability and more likely to get himself, and you, killed.” 

“I’m not leaving him here like a sitting duck,” Piers growled. In what world did they think he was going to abandon Chris in a hostile environment? 

Keith moved in close to Piers and Piers had to clench his jaw to keep from shoving him and breaking his back in two. “Think logically about this, and realise that it’s for _his_ safety that you’re doing this. We’ll lock him in so no-one can get in, and he can’t get out. Find out how to fix him and come back. Do you copy, soldier?” 

Piers hands clenched and he felt the electricity zap up his arm. Keith flinched from the shock he got but stood his ground. 

“Yes Sir.” 

Luckily a lot of the zombies had wandered off while they had been in the room, and only a few stood outside. They were easily disposed of and Piers split up from the duo once they reached the stairs. They went up, while he went down. He wondered what they were actually there for but he didn’t care enough to break orders. His first objective was to get to the labs. 

\---

Chris woke slowly, feeling groggy and disorientated. His arm swiped what looked like medical supplies as he tried to sit up. He grabbed his throbbing head as he stumbled off the bed. What the hell? Where was he? 

He squeezed his eyes shut as he tried to stop the world from spinning. When he opened them he twisted his forearm around in disbelief. What the…? Had he been taking steroids or something? 

He looked around the room to see if there was a doctor or something he could ask but there was no-one around. He tried the only door he could find but it was locked tight. He banged on it once, and heard a strange sound from the other side of the door. Moaning, maybe? He frowned and began searching the room. 

He couldn’t even find his mobile, which was weird. He always had it on him, just in case Claire needed him and tried to call. Then again, if he was hurt or injured Claire had to be nearby, right? Claire was a fair distance from Raccoon City, but he didn’t see why she wouldn’t come and see him. His arm was bandaged and throbbing so he’d obviously done something. Maybe Barry or Jill had shot him; he wouldn’t put it past them. 

Speaking of Barry and Jill, he wondered where his team was. Were they okay? Had something happened in the field? 

He moved the mouse next to the computer and his eyes widened. 

What the hell was that? It looked like a normal person until you noticed the giant right arm. It looked like a mass of muscle and bone and just gross. The twisted muscle seemed to move up into the man’s neck and stopped halfway up his cheek. There were flashing pieces of writing attached to pieces of this body but they were moving through too fast for Chris to read. What kind of fucked up hospital was he in? 

He started rifling through draws and cabinets but it all looked like your standard run of the mill medical supplies. All except the freak on the computer. He growled in frustration and sat back down on the bed. What kind of hospital would lock a patient in their room? Had he hurt someone? Had someone hurt _him_? 

He would report to Wesker as soon as he got out and find out what the hell was going on.


	9. Chapter 9

Chris backed up against the wall, holding his gun steady in front of him. What the fuck was that? It looked like a person but almost like it was rotting from the outside. One eye was white and glossy and the other was bloodshot, and had someone taken a fucking bite out of its cheek? It looked like something from one of the horror films Claire liked to watch. Where the fuck was he? 

When the door to his room had clicked open while he had been putting a shirt he had found with his name on it, he had expected someone to be outside waiting for him. Instead there had been dead bodies littering the ground and a strange noise coming from the next corridor.  
When he had investigated he had found this person.

“Stay back!” he ordered. He wasn’t into shooting unarmed civilians but he wasn’t sure he wanted that thing anywhere near him. His instincts were telling him he didn’t want to get within grabbing distance. “My name is Chris Redfield and I’m part of the Special Tactics and Rescue Service. Please, I don’t want to shoot you. Stay. Back.” 

Another person, one similarly disfigured moved to join the first person. Its arm was hanging at a weird angle and its clothes were covered in blood. Chris’s eyes darted between them. They were moaning at him, and kept moving closer with their arms outstretched and their feet shuffling like they didn’t know how to lift them properly. 

“Don’t come any closer!”  


Fuck, why weren’t they listening? Were they on some kind of medication? Was he in a mental institution? It would definitely explain the fucked up maze of corridors, and the fact that every second door seemed to have some kind of security system attached to it. These were the first people he had encountered here and it had been less than helpful. They wouldn’t even _talk_ to him. 

He grimaced and squeezed the trigger. The shot went straight through the man’s arm, but he kept coming. What the…? He shot twice more: one more in the arm and another in the leg. He was trying not to hit anything vital but it didn’t seem to matter, the man kept coming forward as though nothing had happened. 

Something was very wrong with them. He moved further away from them, his gun not wavering. “Don’t make me kill you,” he pleaded. 

They kept coming. He needed to get away from them, before he was forced to seriously injure them. He ran for the end of the corridor and yelled out when another rotting person latched on to him as he turned the corner.  


On instinct he punched them in the face, and then tried to get away from their grabbing hands. “Let go!” 

Another three people crowded him, trying to grab hold as well. He was being surrounded and they were starting to snap their teeth at him, as if they wanted to take a bite. What the hell was going on? He needed to get away from them. 

He cried out as a pair of teeth latched on to him and bit hard enough that his flesh tore away. “No, get off me!” 

\---

Piers used his mutated arm to hold him up as he did a jumping side kick. The zombie went flying and knocked over the few standing behind him. Piers followed up with a swipe of his arm, slicing two of them in half. 

His clothes were getting to the point where you could see more blood than fabric. He wondered if there was a room he could find some new clothes; those scientist fuckers hadn’t even given him new clothes when they had been doing god knows what to him. Between the sea water, the lack of washing and now zombie guts his clothes were not only rank but ready to fall apart. The BSAA uniform was built to last but his circumstances were well beyond that. 

Piers shot two zombies in the head and a roundhouse kick took care of another. He felt one grab his arm and he flung it sideways. He could hear their bones crack as they impacted with the wall. 

If nothing else, his arm definitely had some juice to it. It also didn’t make him feel like a dogs breakfast if he refrained from using the electrical pulses. If he had time to play around with it he _could_ probably find a way to utilise it for good, but that wasn’t his priority right now and realistically it was a pipe dream he didn’t have the luxury of thinking about. 

He continued on after dispatching another dozen or so zombies that had been blocking his way. He glanced at the 3D floor plan on his device. He wasn’t far from where the labs were supposed to be, which probably explained the amount of zombies that were floating around. This would be where the virus had started, and where the scientists would have been at the time. 

He hated to admit it but Quint and Keith had been right; bringing Chris down here in his current state would have been suicide. 

He cried out as something latched on to him from a doorway as he walked past and he was pulled inside. His arm stopped mere inches from slicing Jill’s face in two.

“What is wrong with you? I could have killed you!” 

“Where is Chris?” 

Piers snarled and pulled away, moving his arm away so it couldn’t accidentally shock Jill. For some reason it really acted up around her. “He’s resting upstairs.” 

“Are Keith and Quint with him?” 

“No, they had something else they wanted to look at.” 

“You left him alone?” 

“I didn’t have a choice!” Piers groaned through gritted teeth as his arm became painfully heavy and gave out small electrical bursts. He gripped it with his normal hand and tried to get it to stop. 

Jill glared and headed out the door. 

“He’s secure,” Piers bit out. He wanted to grab her arm to stop her from advancing but he wasn’t sure he wouldn’t kill her. 

He understood her need to get to Chris, to make sure he was safe. It had been hard enough for him to leave the Captain and come here, and she had more right than him to be worried. But Quint and Keith had been right about this as well; the labs would have the answers they needed. “No-one can get to him, and he can’t get out.” 

“We’re locking him up now?” 

“For his own safety.” 

Jill spun to face him with a furious glare. “If we had just left you in that room none of this would have happened,” she spat. “ _You_ did this.” 

“I know.” Piers clenched his jaw painfully, ignoring the rage echoing through him. He knew she was right, and they should have left him there. He had told them to leave him there, and they hadn’t _listened_. “Our objective is to help Chris, and then it’s your job to get him out of here.” 

Jill took a step back as the electricity in his arm began to spark dangerously. “My job?” 

Piers nodded, looking deliberately at his out of control arm. “You and I both know that I’m not getting out of here. Once you’re out, you need to bury it with me inside.” 

“Chris would never forgive me for that.” 

Piers looked away. He took a deep breath, trying to get his arm under control. “He doesn’t need to know.” He slumped in relief as the electrical pulses stopped and the pain in his arm lessened. He moved to the doorway and checked the corridor. “Now let’s go and find out what the hell was going on down here.” 

“I’m sorry.” 

Piers stopped and looked back in confusion at Jill. “What?” 

“I’m sorry, Piers. It’s not fair of me to treat you like that. You don’t deserve it. I know all about your loyalty to Chris and what you did for him last year. I know that he’s the reason this happened to you.” 

“It was _my_ choice,” Piers snarled.

“I know that you would never intentionally hurt him, and that you have nothing but his best interests at heart. I _know_ how you feel about him.” 

Piers looked away, not sure what to do with that information. Was this her warning to back away from Chris? Because it was unnecessary, it had been unnecessary even when he hadn’t been slated for death row. Even after ignoring the gender issue, it had always been Jill for Chris and Piers had always known that. He had never once tried to undermine what they had. 

“I’m sorry that this is how it’s ended for you.” 

“Me too,” Piers said quietly. When he had first met the larger than life Captain he had dreamed of giving his all for a worthwhile cause; this hadn’t quite been what he had been picturing. The hero never died, but he had never been the hero, had he? That had always been Chris Redfield. 

They walked silently through multiple corridors leading towards the labs. Piers wondered why they hadn’t encountered anymore zombies. Where were they all? The computer monitors had shown way more of them than they had dispatched so far. 

A shot ran out above them and they froze. Another two fired. 

“Keith?” 

Piers shook his head. “No, they were heading in the opposite direction.” 

“Do you think that there’s someone else alive in here?” 

“It’s possible, I suppose. Maybe they came with other soldiers?” 

“Keith doesn’t play well with others.” 

“But he’s a Director?” 

Jill bit her lip. “If there are survivors we have to help them.” 

Piers sighed and nodded. She was right, civilians had to take priority. “I’ll go. You keep looking for the labs, and I’ll meet you back here in a half hour.” 

“Okay.” 

Piers turned and headed back towards the stairs. 

“Piers.” 

He turned his head. “What?” 

“Be careful.” 

“…Will do.” 

\-----

“Do you think the Captain will be okay?” Quint asked.

Keith shrugged. He shot a zombie in the forehead and watched in satisfaction as it dropped to the ground. “100 points.” 

Quint glanced at him as he continued to work on the security panel next to the large steel door in front of them. “Just keep an eye on our six, jeez.” 

“Just finish fiddling with your girlfriend and get us in there.” Keith crossed his arms and leant back against the wall. “Do you think Intel is right? About what we’re gonna find in there.” 

“I hope not but chances are yeah, they’re right.” 

“Well, fuck me. Is this war ever gonna end?” 

Quint cursed and shook his finger as the panel zapped him. “It’s our job isn’t it; to rid the world of bioterrorism?” 

“You’re such a poster boy.” 

Quint glared. 

The panel beeped and one of the three red lights turned to green. Quint grinned and moved to the next set of panels. “Do you think Nivans is gonna be all right?” 

“Speaking of poster boys,” Keith said with a laugh. “That guy is a walking talking example of what a BSAA operative is supposed to be, even now.” 

“You admire him?” Quint asked, a hint of surprise in his voice. 

“I admire what he’s done for the cause. Even now, thinking that he’s going to die _again_ he’s fighting as hard as he can to keep the Captain alive and keep the good fight going.” 

Quint frowned. “I honestly think that has more to do with the Captain than with the cause.” 

Keith nodded. “Yeah, you’re definitely right about that. But it’s more than that. You can’t fight a cause with all your heart if you’re not emotionally invested. He’s found something worth fighting for and he’s giving his everything for it; how can you not admire that?” 

“I guess.” Quint sounded sceptical. The panel beeped again and the second red light turned to green. 

“If you had someone waiting for you at home you’d fight harder to make sure you got home alive, right?” 

“Well, yeah, I think so, but Nivans doesn’t have anyone at home…?” 

“I’m talking about the Captain, idiot. Now get us in that room already.” 

A group of zombies ambled around the corner and Keith stood straight, alert. He began firing as Quint continued to press buttons. “Now, Quint.” 

“Patience is a virtue.”

“Keep your slogans to yourself you tosser, and _get us in that room_. Don’t make me ask you again!”

“Security isn’t exactly child’s play, you wanna have a go?” 

“I’m about to shoot you.” 

“Then see how far you get with this door.” 

“One more word Quint, and I’m carving your name into one of these bullets.” 

“Bitch, bitch,” Quint muttered. 

Keith emptied his gun and reloaded, as more zombies came around the corner. The sound of his firing was attracting more and more of them. He glanced at Quint, checking his progress. Quint’s brows were furrowed as he concentrated on getting the last code entered. 

As soon as the third light turned green and the doors slid open Keith grabbed Quint by the scruff of his neck and shoved him inside. A zombie grabbed at his arm and he kneed it in the stomach, twisting his body to break free. As soon as he cleared the threshold of the room  
Quint pressed the emergency close button and the doors slid shut with a bang, slicing the hand off a zombie trying to get through.

Keith’s face screwed up in disgust and he kicked the hand away from him.

“That was close,” Quint said, sounding out of breath. 

“Welcome to the BSAA; close calls and dead friends.” 

“That’s not funny.” 

Keith surveyed their surroundings and his eyes widened. He walked towards a large tank in the middle of the room. “Holy fuck, we’re in trouble.”


	10. Chapter 10

“Look at this.” 

Keith stepped back from the glass and looked over Quint’s shoulder. “What am I looking at?” 

“They’ve wiped him clean.” 

“I don’t know what that means, tech boy. Did they give him a sponge bath?” 

Quint pointed to the screen. “These are his neural patterns. This area is where memory is stored in the brain, and it’s usually in constant motion. Right now, his is completely still.” 

“English, Quint.” 

“He has no memories, nothing.” 

“Why would they do that?” 

“Beats me. I assume they were using his antibodies for something but he’s harmless in that tank; it makes no sense why they wouldn’t want him to remember his entire life.” 

“What about like, normal shit? Walking, talking, using the toilet?” 

“It’s not like there’s a manual just lying around Grinder.” 

Keith wrinkled his nose and looked around the room, holding his rifle high and ready to use if needed. “Just save all the files and get his tank ready for extraction.” 

“Yeah, yeah, I’m on it.” 

\---

“Captain!” 

God no, this couldn’t be happening. The three zombies surrounding Chris were dead in an instant but he knew it was already too late; he could see the bite marks. Chris just stared up at him, looking shell-shocked, as Piers checked him over.

“No, no, no, no,” Piers groaned. He checked the bites but they were unmistakable. Chris had been infected with the t-virus. 

“Get off me! Who the hell are you?” 

Piers shook his head as he gripped tighter to Chris’s bitten arm. “No, this can’t be happening. You can’t have been-please, no.” 

He barely registered as Chris shoved him backwards and he landed awkwardly on his ass. 

“What the hell is going on here? You just _shot_ them! Christ, your arm!” 

How had this happened? What was he going to do? This couldn’t be happening. Not Chris, never _Chris_. 

“Start talking, _now_.” 

Piers looked up into the barrel of a gun. Chris had stood at some point and was looking down at him with a mixture of shock, anger and confusion across his face. The gun was shaking slightly but wouldn’t miss the target if Chris pulled the trigger. What the-? 

“Are you paying attention now?” Chris snarled. 

Piers kept his gaze on Chris, not moving. 

“What was wrong with them? What’s wrong with your arm? Why did they bite me? Where the hell are we? Where is my team?” 

Piers couldn’t remember who had been on Chris’s team when he had first joined the BSAA, and he had no clue where they were now. As for what was wrong with the zombies? Why wouldn’t Chris already know that? Unless…

Chris moved the gun a bit closer to Piers. “Tell me!” 

“If you tell me what year it is I could answer that question.” 

“Excuse me?” 

“I need to know what year it is.” 

“Are you insane? I’m asking the questions!” 

“Put the gun down,” Piers said. He tried to lift his hands to placate Chris but a glimpse of his mutated arm had Chris’s face hardening as the big man took another step back.

“Who the hell are you?” 

Piers brows furrowed. “You don’t recognise me?” 

“Why the hell would I recognise you? I’ve never seen you before in my life.” Chris hissed and clutched at his arm briefly, as though trying to stem the pain.

Piers wanted to get closer and bandage the wounds but he knew it didn’t matter. Bandaging wouldn’t stop the infection from spreading and killing him. Fuck, how had this happened? 

“My name is Piers Nivans, and I’m not going to hurt you, I promise.” 

Chris snorted and gestured to his arm with the hand holding his gun. “Right. Because you don’t look like Frankenstein. What’s wrong with your arm? It doesn’t look like…them.” 

“It’s a different strain.” 

“Strain of what? Is this some kind of –disease?” 

“I was infected with a virus, but I’m not-” He stopped. He couldn’t say he wasn’t contagious because on top of that fucking t-virus, Chris was infected with whatever he had as well. How had things gone so wrong? How could he have messed up so badly that Chris had been infected not once, but twice! “I’m not dangerous to you. Please, we need to get you somewhere safe.” 

“Safe from those _people_? Are there more of them?” 

“There are a lot more of them, and we need to go somewhere that’s safer for you.” 

Chris kept glancing from him to the bodies littering the floor, as though he weren’t sure what he wanted to do, and whether he wanted to trust Piers. The Chris Piers knew wasn’t one to trust easily, and would probably keep him up front with a gun in his back. But he didn’t know this Chris, not really. 

“It-it’s 1997. Is that not what year it is? Did something happen to me? What is this place?” 

Piers could just imagine how confused Chris was. Probably just as confused as he had been when the scientists had woken him up in that strange room and he had fought for days with his virus, trying to keep control. 

Piers tried to remember the earlier details of Chris’s career. 1997 meant he wasn’t in the military anymore… it might have been just after he joined the STARS team. 

“You know Jill Valentine?” 

“How do you know Jill?” 

Piers ignored the dull ache reminding him how long Chris had truly known Jill and how much history they had together. 

“Jill is here, I can take you to her. Please come with me.” 

Chris groaned and gripped his arm again. “It’s burning.” 

“We need to clean and bandage your wounds.” He didn’t dare move closer to Chris, not when the gun was still pointed at him. 

“There were bandages in the room I was in, I can get some there.” 

Piers nodded slowly. “Okay, but you have to stop pointing that gun at me, Captain.” 

Chris’s gaze slid to Piers’ arm again and after what felt likes decades he lowered his gun. 

Piers waited for a few moments before he tentatively stood, making sure to keep his movements slow and non-threatening. 

He tried not to feel offended at the distance Chris kept between them as they walked. Piers was a stranger to him, and he looked like a monster; any sane person who didn’t know him would steer clear. He could feel Chris glancing at him every now and again, his finger remaining on the trigger of his gun, alert and ready. Piers knew that even without his memories of being a part of the BSAA or any of the Umbrella incidents, Chris Redfield was still a lethal machine. 

“Piers, was it?” 

“That’s right.” He checked around the corner before they continued on. The last thing they needed was to be ambushed by more infected. 

“You already know who I am, don’t you?” 

Piers nodded, but didn’t say anything.

“What is going on here, Piers? How do you know me, but I don’t know you? Why did those _people_ bite me?” 

“The creatures you saw were infected with a virus called the t-virus. It reanimates dead cells, basically bringing the dead to life.” 

Chris gave out a sharp laugh. “Bringing the dead to life? That’s insane.” 

“Is it so hard to believe? You saw them, and what they looked like.” 

They entered the med bay, and Piers could see the disarray that must have been caused when Chris awoke. Considering he had lost more of his life after waking again he would have been disorientated and confused. But how had he gotten out of the room? None of Chris’s career had involved hacking or electronics like that. It had never occurred to any of them that he would be able to get out.  
Not to mention the fact that Chris seemed fine now. There was no signs of a fever, or of any delirium. Piers realised that Chris was even walking fine. Had his own virus done something to him? 

“Here,” Chris said. He grabbed two rolls of bandages and threw them at Piers. Piers fumbled with them as he tried to hold them all one handed. His mutated arm was pretty much useless when it came to practical things, since he didn’t have a hand or fingers or anything useful. 

Chris bit his lip and Piers glared at the Captain’s obvious attempts to stifle his laughter. 

Piers kicked the door shut with his heel. “I’m going to need help,” he said, holding his mutated arm up, “and you’re going to need to come closer.” 

Chris glanced at his arm and Piers could see his arm flex slightly as he gripped the gun in his hand tighter.

“Look, if I wanted to hurt you I would have already done it. Please, Captain, we need to bandage the wounds.” 

“That’s the second time you’ve called me that.” 

Piers winced and looked away. “It’s a habit, I’m sorry.” 

“I’m not a Captain anymore, are you from the USAF?” He gestured at Piers clothes. “I don’t recognise the markings…and your tag has come off.” 

Piers fingered the area where his BSAA patch had been. He had ripped it off and given it to Chris. He wondered if Chris still had it. “I’ve never been in the Air Force,” he said. “It’s complicated.” 

“So un-complicate it.” 

“It’s not that easy, Captain.” 

“ _Stop_ calling me that!” 

Piers gritted his teeth and flinched when Chris shoved another bandage and a package of wipes into his stomach. 

“Where do you want me?” 

Piers swallowed his sarcastic retort and gestured to the bed in the middle of the room that Chris had lain on not long ago. Piers found some bottles of water and settled all his items next to Chris’s seated form. 

He could see Chris’s jaw clench when Piers grabbed his arm and held it out. 

“Relax, please.” 

“Under the circumstances I think you’ll have to forgive me for being cautious. Not to mention you look like something out of a B-Grade horror movie.” 

Piers smirked and shook his head. He held up the water bottle. “Top, please.” 

Chris glanced at the bottle and met his eyes. He moved forward with his good arm and unscrewed the top. Piers took a swig of the water and then poured it over Chris’s arm. Chris hissed and grabbed Piers hand. The bottle crinkle beneath their grip.

“Is that water or alcohol?” Chris said through gritted teeth. 

“It’s just water but the cleansing will hurt. I thought you were a soldier?” Piers teased. 

“I was never _bitten_ as a soldier. I’m still not sure I believe that someone actually bit me.” 

Piers wished with all his heart it wasn’t true. He hoped to god there was a vaccine here and Jill found it while she was searching. He couldn’t-he couldn’t watch this happen to Chris. Anyone but Chris. 

“They aren’t people anymore.” He gently pried the bottle from Chris’s grip and put it down. He grabbed some of the wipes, and carefully cleaned around the wound. 

He jumped when something touched his mutated arm. 

Chris pulled his hand back. “Sorry.” 

Piers put the wipe down on the bed. “It’s fine.” 

He locked eyes with Chris and pulled his hand back onto his arm. Chris flinched and then looked down, watching his fingers as they trailed across the bumps and sinewy flesh. 

Piers swallowed hard at the strange sensations of someone touching him there. It wasn’t unpleasant, just strange. Not to mention Chris had never touched him like this before, he had always been way too reserved for that. He had one arm hugs during photos, and a pat on the back if something had gone well, but something that bordered on a caress? There was no way in hell. Is this what Chris had been like before the viral outbreak had changed his life? This open? 

“Does it hurt?” 

Piers nodded. “Yeah.” 

“How did it happen?” 

“Someone I cared about was in danger and I needed to save them; injecting myself with the virus was the only way.” 

“You did this to yourself?” 

“Yeah.” 

“They must have been really important to you.” Chris pulled his arm away and helped Piers unravel one of the bandages. He held the end as Piers wound it around his injured arm.

Piers didn’t answer. He had no idea how to answer that. He had given his life for Chris, and he would do it again in a heartbeat. Important to him? Words didn’t even begin to describe the loyalty he had for his Captain. 

\---

“Doesn’t look like we’re gonna be moving this far,” Quint said. 

Keith sighed. “Are you serious? Orders are if we found it to get it out; find a way.” 

“Aren’t you the boss?” 

Keith crossed his arms and lent against the desk. “Just find a way to get it out of here Jackass.” 

Quint looked around the control panel a bit more, pressed a few buttons. He threw up his hands when a red light squealed at him. “The only way to get him out is to drain the tank.” 

“Would that…wake him up?” 

“Yeah, probably, so…” 

“So _find another way_.” 

Quint sighed and began pressing more buttons on the panels. 

Keith checked his weapons and started another perimeter search. The sooner they got this done, the sooner they could rendezvous with Alpha team and get the fuck out of this place. 

\---

Piers checked around the corner, keeping a firm grip on his weapon. “Okay, it’s clear.” 

Chris nodded and followed. He was holding his own weapon high, ready to fire if needed. “So, are we likely to run into more of those…zombies?” 

“Most likely,” Piers said. “As long as we’re quiet and watch where we’re going we’ll be fine.” 

Piers watched as Chris checked the area, taking note of the vents and locked doors. “You never told me what kind of place this is. Pretty high security here.” 

“It’s some kind of research facility. I don’t know where it is, but considering where I was when I was infected I’d say we’re in China.” 

“ _China?_ ” 

Piers tried opening a few of the doors that they passed but none of them budged. He had left without the map and had no idea where they were, and he needed to find a room that would give him some idea of the direction that they needed to go in. 

“I never thanked you,” Chris said, as they walked. “For helping me out back there.” 

Piers glanced at him, and shoved at another door. “There’s no need to thank me.” He couldn’t help the glances he kept shooting at Chris. There was something different about the way the Captain held himself. Less sure, like he wasn’t comfortable in his own skin. If the rumours were right, then he wouldn’t have been comfortable in the large frame. He remembered the email he had sent to Claire, shortly after she had visited. He had asked for pictures of the scrawny kid Chris had been rumoured to be. He wondered if she had ever replied to it. He had never had the chance to check. Once they had lost the Captain in Edonia the search had consumed his life. And then China…

Piers held up a hand as Chris opened his mouth to speak. “Shhh.” He pressed his ear to the wall and the rumbling sound he’d heard got louder. “There’s something in there.”

“Some _thing_ , not some _one_?” 

“No noise of the dead. More like a generator maybe? A buzzing kind of sound. We need to get in this room.” 

“Do we need to power something up?” Chris asked. 

“No, but where there’s power there might be computers, or some form of technology.” 

“You’ve lost me,” Chris said. “I thought we were meeting up with Jill.” 

“We are, but we need to work out how to get to her, first.” 

“You don’t know how to get to her?” 

Piers shook his head. “This place is like a maze, and I’ve never set foot in these halls,” he said. “We heard gunshots so I came to investigate. Then we got…lost.” He’d woken up in his white room months ago, and he’d never left. This place was as much a mystery to him as it was to Chris. Christ, he’d never gotten lost his entire career. Of course today had to be the first day. 

“Check that side of the door, see if there’s a panel or an opening, or something,” he said. He checked his side while Chris checked the other. There were no bumps, no panels, nothing. If there was an electronic way to open the door it wasn’t in plain sight. He slammed his hand on the wall, feeling it crumple slightly beneath his palm. “Dammit!” 

“Hey, calm down.” 

Piers shook his head and dropped it against the wall, his eyes falling closed. Couldn’t just one thing go right here? Just fucking _one_ thing. Ever since Chris had let him out of the room that had been his hell for god knows how long it had been one new disaster after another. 

He tensed when he felt a hand on his shoulder. He gritted his teeth as he tried not to shiver when the hand massaged slightly. 

“We’ll just look for another room,” Chris said. 

“We’re going to run into the same problem with every room we try to get into.” 

“Then we find a way in, or we keep looking until we find a room we can get into,” Chris said. “We’ll figure it out.” 

Piers clenched his eyes shut tighter. He almost sounded like his Captain, like the man he had chosen to give his life for. Clearly Chris had been dependable his whole life. 

He pushed himself off from the wall and turned. His chest pushed against Chris’s and he froze, not having realised how close the man had been to him. Chris was taller than him but it had never been as obvious as it was right that second. Piers swallowed hard as he looked up. 

Chris’s warm smile almost undid him. He wasn’t sure that Chris had ever looked that openly at him. They had been friendly, of course. You couldn’t watch someone’s back for that long and not become close, but this was different. All the years, all the stress and worry and pain that Chris had gone through over the years was gone. All erased, and for the first time the realisation that he was staring at a Chris from the past was cemented into his mind. This wasn’t the battle weary Captain from the BSAA. This was a Chris that still had stars in his eyes, and believed the best in everyone.  
Chris placed both hands on the side of Piers neck. “I have a good aim, and you have that monster of an arm, we’ll get through it.” 

“O-of course, Captain,” Piers said, hating how his voice cracked a little. Christ, it was like he was a fourteen year old boy with his first crush. 

“You still haven’t told me why you call me that,” Chris said. 

Piers took a step back and looked away. “It’s not important right now. Help me find a way in, okay?” 

He could feel Chris’s gaze on him, but eventually Chris turned and started feeling along the creases in the door. Piers knew it was a long shot but what choice did they have? There had to be a way into the room. How else did you bloody get in there?


	11. Chapter 11

Piers kicked the bottom of the door in frustration. What kind of stupid door didn’t have a way to open it? That was the whole point of a bloody door! 

“I have an idea.” 

Piers glanced to where Chris was leaning his shoulder against the wall. “Actually, I thought I’d just keep kicking and maybe it would cave in eventually.” 

Chris laughed and pushed himself off the wall. “Well, we _could_ try that. Or we could try using your arm.” 

Piers wasn’t following. “The door is solid steel, I don’t think even this thing could break it down.” 

“Well, no. But I noticed that it’s electrical, right?” 

“…right?” He still wasn’t following.

Chris smiled and shook his head. He gestured at the door. “There’s a small red light on the door where the handle should be, which makes me think that the locking mechanism might be electrical as well. So why don’t you try giving it a jolt and see what happens?” 

Piers looked at the door. He’d never tried to control his charges like that. It’s not like he’d had the arm for long enough to even think about it, and it was so out of control he didn’t think he could. “There a Plan B?” 

“Just try it.” 

“Fine, but go to the end of the hall, I don’t want to hurt you.” 

“It’ll be fine,” Chris said. He moved to the opposite side of the hall and leaned his back against the wall. 

It was only a few steps away though and Piers wasn’t sure that was far enough away if something went wrong. He also knew Chris was a stubborn son of a bitch and he’d be more likely to die of old age in here than budge him from his plan. 

Chris gestured for him to go on. 

Piers sighed and turned to the door. He used his left hand to hold the arm upright and grit his teeth as he tried to push out a small electric current but nothing happened. 

“Might want to try giving it a little more juice.” 

Piers glared at him over his shoulder; Chris sounded far too amused at his expense. He pushed out more electricity and cried out as he was shoved backwards, straight into Chris. They tumbled to the ground, Chris’s heavy weight on top of him. 

Chris pushed up onto his hands and looked down at him. Piers tried to ignore the warmth of Chris’s body covering his. 

“No happy medium, huh?” 

Piers wanted to do a lot of things with that smirk, all of them X-rated. Instead he shoved at Chris’s shoulders and forced the big guy to get off him. Chris pulled too hard helping him up and he collided into Chris’s chest. If he held on a second longer than he needed to, well, no-one needed to know. 

The door to the room was a bit crumpled and worse for wear, but the light had shifted to green and with a push Piers was able to pry it open. 

“Jackpot.” The room was full of computer monitors, and hardware. They were lined on three of the walls.

“Jesus Christ,” Chris whispered, horrified.

There were two bodies on the computer chairs. Piers checked them over to make sure they weren’t going to turn or anything, but they both had identical holes in the forehead.

“Suicide, looks like,” Piers said. “There are no bite marks, but maybe they knew they weren’t getting out of here alive and decided to end it.” 

“That’s kind of morbid,” Chris said. “I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to seeing dead bodies.” His voice was low, almost like he hadn’t intended for Piers to hear it. 

Piers didn’t say anything anyway. Chris _had_ gotten used to it. For them it was an everyday thing. You did what you could, fought the good fight but casualties were a part it. Unfortunately, the casualties didn’t always stay dead. 

“You start on that, I’ll start here. We’re looking for any information on the facility, and some kind of floor plan. Jill is below us on the next level so a way down would be the ideal starting place.” 

Chris nodded and Piers started pressing keys, flicking through screens and trying to find something useful. There was a lot of code filtering through that didn’t make any sense to him. And something about a ‘Code W’, whatever the hell that was. 

He stopped on a file that had Code W written at the top.

_‘The subject has begun to show signs of life. His viral levels go haywire any time his heart begins to pump. We aren’t sure if this means the anti-bodies no longer work, or if the infection is now a part of the subject. Doctor Sinkos wants to begin his testing soon, but Laboratory B have some concerns and want to put more fail-safes in place. Bunch of idiots, worrying about containment when we are so close to reaching a breakthrough. I found the paperwork identifying problems in the structure maintaining the subject. I think I’ll just have to conveniently burn it with the discarded bodies on Level 7. It’s time to begin the Code W process.’_

Piers really didn’t want to know what they meant by discarded bodies. Subject for Code W….were they talking about him? But he didn’t have any anti-bodies that they knew of. When he had injected himself with the virus it had certainly done what it was supposed to do. Nothing would have happened if he was immune. 

He clicked on one of the files pictures and studied it. He couldn’t identify the body that was pictured in the large liquid tank. It was grotesque and he wasn’t sure _anyone_ would be able to identify it.

“What the hell is that?” 

Piers glanced at Chris. 

“Some kind of containment tank. It would have been similar to what they put me in when I came here, I guess.” 

He studied the picture, trying to ignore the awkward silence. He reached forward to move to the next picture when Chris spoke.

“So…what happened to you? I mean, how did you get here? Is this where it happened?” 

Piers sighed and closed the files he had open. He moved through some more pages, trying to find a map of some kind. “An organisation called Neo-Umbrella had an underground facility that was holding someone that could have been the key to solving a lot of problems. Ch-my partner and I went in to get them out. Long story short, I injected myself with the virus and was still in the facility when it blew up.” 

“You survived that?” 

“Survived is probably a strong word, but I’m here I guess. Whoever owns this lab found me, put me in a tank and healed me and then shoved me in a room. I have no idea how long I’ve been down here, or what they’ve been doing.” 

There was more silence as Piers continued to flick through the useless information on the screen. It would have been ideal to be able to download it all for the BSAA to look through later but he had nothing to put it on, wouldn’t even know where to start, and he had more important things to worry about. If he saw Quint again he’d let him know. 

“That must have been hard, I’m sorry.” 

Piers frowned. He stopped pressing the keys on the computer and turned to fully face Chris. “Don’t be sorry. I made choices that I would make every single time, and I don’t regret anything. I should have died down there and I didn’t, and that’s not on either of us.” Because of all the things in the world, more guilt was the last thing _any_ Chris Redfield needed. 

Chris crossed his arms and furrowed his brows. “You wanted to die down there?” 

Piers snorted and turned back to the computer. “No-one wants to die. But I was ready to do what was necessary, for my partner and for the BSAA. Like I said, I’d do it again in a heartbeat.” 

“Self-sacrifice is never necessary.” 

Piers clenched his hand and tried hard to ignore the pulse of anger sneaking up his spine. “If I hadn’t made the choice I had my partner wouldn’t be alive, and there’s no sacrifice I wouldn’t give to keep him in this world.” What a fucking joke. He couldn’t believe he was having this conversation with Chris, about Chris. It was like the whole world had gone mad. 

“That’s…pretty intense.” 

Piers finally found what he was looking for. There were three different floor plans, each one with different levels of detail. He typed in ‘Code W’ in the search panel and waited as it loaded. He wanted to know what it was, what they were doing down there. He needed to know what that thing was, and if it was connected to him; he needed to know what they had done to him down here, and in turn, what might be happening to Chris. Except for the memory loss all the side effects were gone. The disorientation and weird behaviour seemed to have passed. 

“Sounds like you were more than just job partners.” 

Piers sighed and wanted to hang his head. He needed to memorise the layout of the complex and Chris was like a dog with a bone. “Wouldn’t you do anything to save Jill?” 

“Well, yeah, I guess. She’s part of my team so I’d have her back, just like I’d have any of my teammates back. I don’t know if I’d go as far as the intensity you’ve got.” 

Right, of course. The bond he had with Jill, and the start of their relationship, had probably solidified after the mansion incident.

“It wasn’t like that,” Piers said. 

According to the layout there was a set of stairs that would take them below to the level Jill was on, and it was only two halls down; if they had kept on the path they were going they would have hit them anyway. That would take them to the opposite end of the floor, but it seemed like a fairly straight run to where Jill had been heading. Once they got down the stairs there would be two hallways, and one large room between them and Jill. He kept repeating the turns in his head, making sure he had them down pat so that they wouldn’t head in the wrong direction.

“But you wanted it to be.” 

Piers growled and turned. “Why the hell is this so important to you? We’re underground who knows how fucking far, surrounded by zombies that want to eat us. Is this really a good time to be talking about whether I wanted to sleep with my Captain or not?” 

Chris reeled back. “Your _Captain?_ ” 

Piers moved towards the door as he said, “Look, we just need to get out of here. Jill will be waiting for us.” 

He started to open the metal door when a large hand smacked down on it, hard, and slammed it shut. Piers growled and turned to face Chris, who was hovering too close. 

“I think that maybe you haven’t told me everything that’s going on around here.” 

“All you need to know is that you’re in danger and we need to get out of here.” 

“This Captain you’re talking about, are we one and the same?” 

Sometimes Piers really hated how clever Chris was under all that muscle and bravado. Sometimes it would have just been easier if he was a muscle-bound idiot, all brawn and no brain. 

“No,” Piers said, looking away. With his memory wiped so far back it was true. They may have been inhabiting the same body but the person in front of him wasn’t the Chris he knew. 

“Your mouth twitches down a little when you’re hiding something.” 

Piers looked up at Chris, shocked. How the…? 

“Exactly,” Chris said. “I don’t know how I know that, but I just do. You seemed familiar to me, even from the start, when I could honestly say I had no idea who you are. I still don’t know who you are, but I feel like I do. Which makes no sense at all.” 

“It’s complicated.”

“You’ve mentioned that before.” 

“We need to get to Jill.” 

“She can wait.” 

Piers shoved Chris aside and moved further back into the room. He felt like ripping his hair out. “What do you want from me?” 

“The truth would be a good start. A lot of shit has happened in the last hour and I’m more than confused. I’d like it if things started to make a little fucking sense, and I’d like if I wasn’t  
lied to.” 

Piers crossed his arms and lent against the desk that held the computer equipment. “The truth? You’re part of an organisation called the BSAA. It stands for Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance. You’re the Captain of Alpha Team, which is part of the Special Operations Unit: the SOU.” 

“That makes no sense. Why would I not remember something like that? I’m part of the STARS unit.” 

“You _were_ a part of STARS. Fifteen years ago; they don’t exist anymore.” 

Chris stepped back a pace. “What? How is that…?” 

“You’ve been infected with a virus that is causing memory loss. In the last three hours you’ve lost almost half of your life. We don’t know why it’s happening, and we don’t know exactly what’s causing it. That’s the truth.” 

“You were just going to hide this from me?” 

Piers laughed, but it didn’t sound humorous. “What was I supposed to say? Hey there, my names Piers, you don’t remember me because you’ve mentally blanked back to fifteen years ago, welcome to your life.” 

“Okay, say I believe you. If the STARS unit no longer exists, what is Jill doing here?” 

“She’s a part of the BSAA as well. You and Jill are part of the group that founded the entire organisation. She acts as an Operative, doing missions usually alone or with a partner.” 

“Are we still partners?”

“Not usually; you’re part of Alpha Team and go where we go. You’re still together though, outside of work.” 

Chris ran a hand through his hair. “Together? That’s not even possi-” 

An alarm sounded from above them, echoing in the small room. A female voice began to speak.

 _‘Contamination tank in Room 203 has been released. You have five minutes to evacuate to your nearest decontamination room before safety procedures are put into effect.’_

“What does it mean by safety procedures?” Chris said. 

_‘Contamination tank in Room 203 has been released. You have five minutes to evacuate to your nearest decontamination room before safety procedures are put into effect.’_

“So I think we need to find the nearest decontamination room.” 

“No,” Piers said. “We don’t have time for that. We need to find Jill.” 

“I want to find her as much as you, and get some answers. But that-”

_‘Contamination tank in Room 203 has been released. You have five minutes to evacuate to your nearest decontamination room before safety procedures are put into effect.’_

“Well, it sounds pretty serious. I’m not sure we want to be around for these safety procedures.” 

“We’ll be fine. It can’t be any worse than the zombies running around.” Piers pulled out his gun and tried to check the clip, but it was proving to be difficult with one hand. Warm fingers gripped his shoulder.

“You want some help?” 

Piers wanted to growl no, because he hated that he needed help with such a basic thing but…”Yeah, one handed sucks.” 

“Looks like,” Chris said. He gently pulled the gun from Piers grip. Piers was sure he imagined the way Chris’s fingers lingered on his own as he took the weapon. His wishful thinking had always been his downfall. 

“Don’t worry,” Chris said, as he handed Piers his gun back and moved to flank the door. “I’ll protect you.” With a wink he flung the door open and went out.

Piers couldn’t help the smirk on his face as he followed.


	12. Chapter 12

“What did you do?” 

“ _Me?_ This was _your_ idea.” 

“You’re the one who flipped the switch.” 

“Because you told me to!” Quint whined. 

Keith smacked him on the back of the head. “Get on the computer tech boy and find out what security measures they’re talking about.” 

Keith hadn’t liked the mission when it had been brought to him, mainly because of the lack of information about the facility; he liked it even less now. 

“Painful ones that mean we’re gonna die! How do you always get me into these messes?” 

“You volunteered to go, remember?” 

“What was I thinking!?” 

Keith grinned at him, before peering into the tank. All the liquid had been drained and the body was curled in the center. “Is it going to wake up?” He…it…thing…he wasn’t sure what to call it, really. Was it a person anymore? 

Quint just shrugged and started plugging away at the computer console. 

If they got out of this alive, and that _was_ the plan, then Quint was owed a nice big bonus. And a vacation. Speaking of getting out of the facility… “See what information you can find out about Lieutenant Nivans and whatever they did to him in here as well.” 

“Sure thing Grinder. But why?” 

“I don’t want to see him end up as a lab rat for the rest of his life.” Considering what had happened to Sherry Birkin when she had been infected, even though she was originally thought to have been cured, he didn’t want to risk it happening to anyone else. He knew how ruthless the government could be. He wasn’t supposed to know that, of course, it was way beyond just classified. But he had files on them they would probably kill him for if they ever found out. 

Agent Jill Valentine had been tested, and kept secured for months when she had come home, and he wasn’t naïve enough to think that Nivans would get out of _that_ but Piers wasn’t cured, not the way that they were. It hadn’t merged with him in a way that could be hidden… that _arm…_ but there had to be something they could do. 

“Sorry to say it boss, but I don’t think that Nivans is ever going to have a normal life.” 

Keith shrugged. “Only time will tell. You finished yet?” 

He could practically hear Quint rolling his eyes at him. 

“There’s nothing in here about the Lieutenant. It’s just got stuff on the one specimen, and I don’t understand a lot of it.”

“Something you don’t understand?” 

“It’s science, not technology.” 

“What’s the difference?” 

“If I didn’t need you to get out of here…” Quint muttered. 

Quint jumped backwards suddenly and Keith went on the alert, gun raised. It took him a moment to work out what had freaked Jackass. 

“It woke up!” Quint yelled.

“I can see that,” Keith said. He was edging back to where Quint was, his weapon pointed firmly at the tank. The person inside was screaming and banging on the glass, though it must have had some serious sound proofing because they couldn’t hear a thing. 

“Calm down,” Keith ordered. Maybe it could lip read, though it seemed too manic to notice or understand anything.

“I don’t think it can hear you.” 

“Thanks, genius.” 

“Hey, you’re the one talking to him! We need to get out of here!” 

Keith kicked at Quint’s leg, not taking his eyes from the tank. “We can’t just leave them in here. If they get out we need to handle it.” 

“I didn’t sign up for this.” 

“Sure ya did. Fighting bioterrorism remember, tech boy?” 

“I hate you.” Quint moved to the door they had come through and began fiddling with the electronic panel next to it. Keith hoped that the zombies had vacated the area if Quint was going to open it. He wasn’t sure he had enough bullets to fight the entire facility. And he didn’t fancy being eaten alive. 

He frowned when he noticed that the bottom of the tank was… “How solid is that thing?” 

“…Uh…” Quint turned from the door. “I don’t know, why?” 

“Because it’s breaking!” 

\----

Piers grabbed the back of Chris’s shirt and pulled him to a stop. Chris looked back at him with a confused expression. “What?” 

“Something’s wrong.” 

They looked down the empty hallway.

“Looks fine to me.” 

Piers rolled his eyes, all three of them. “Just stay here and let me check it out.” 

“Why can’t I check it out?” 

“Just stay here.” Piers shoved him as he went through and headed down the hallway. 

“Piers!” 

He had a split second to react as the floor fell beneath him. He tried to grab onto the edge but his mutated arm slipped without an appendage to grip with. Pain sliced through him as sharp edges pierced through him.

“Piers!” 

He felt the blood trickling out of his mouth. Sharp spikes had gone through his abdomen, his mutated arm and right leg. He wasn’t sure how he was still alive, it had to have burst something vital; the spikes weren’t exactly small. 

“Oh my god, Piers!” 

“No,” he gurgled. “Don’t come down here.” 

“Tell me how to fix this,” Chris said, sounding panicked. 

Piers heard some shuffling and then hands were grabbing at him, prying at him. God, he did not want to get eaten down here. But nothing was biting or clawing at him… “Ch-Chris…?” 

“Yeah, it’s me. Christ, this is bad. I’m gonna lift you off, okay? Just hold on.” 

Piers let out a cry of pain as he was lifted slowly from the spikes. He coughed up more blood as he was laid on the ground between the spikes. “You need to fin-find Jill, and get ou-out of here,” he said, struggling to breathe. He could feel his own blood pooling around him. He wasn’t sure if this was better or worse than being blown up. 

“No, I’m not leaving you.” 

Chris’s hands were all over him, touching him everywhere and it was a strange sensation of pain and pleasure and it was overwhelming and he wanted it to stop. 

“Lea-leave me, find Jill,” Piers urged. 

“No!” 

Piers coughed again. He felt something wipe his face and he opened his eyes to see Chris staring down at him. If he died now he could die happy, knowing that someone, that _Chris_ , was with him. It was better than dying alone; he already knew how terrifying that was. 

Chris wrapped a hand around the back of his head and cradled it. “Please, don’t leave me here alone. Come on, you can pull through this.”

Piers opened his mouth but nothing came out. 

\----

Jill slammed the door shut, jolting backwards as the multiple bodies on the opposite side tried to push through. She leant back against the door, ignoring the rhythmic thump. That had been too close. The hallways could go from empty to full within seconds as soon as any kind of noise was made. She wasn’t even sure it had been _her_ making the noise that time. 

She didn’t have enough ammo to fight her way through anything. Piers and Chris hadn’t checked in with her when they were supposed to. Quint and Keith had gone missing, and she had no idea where she was in the facility anymore. The entire mission had turned into a complete fail. 

She still couldn’t wrap her head around the fact that Piers Nivans was still alive, had been alive in this facility the whole time. She was more than pleased for Chris, but also worried about what the consequences would be. He was very obviously infected and she didn’t know what that would mean for getting out of here. Piers didn’t think he was getting out, he had made that more than clear. 

Jill just wasn’t sure Chris would survive that again. 

She moved further into the room. It looked to be some sort of office, with dozens of cubicles. Most of the hardware was gone but some of the cubicles on the other side of the room still had their computers. Maybe she could get some information from them. 

She stopped dead when she spotted a figure ambling towards her. She raised her weapon and watched it for a moment, just to make sure. The last thing she needed was to shoot survivors. But it was definitely a zombie, considering half its face was missing. 

One shot to the head and it dropped. Suddenly, the room became awash in noise as zombies began moving from their hiding places; beneath desks and behind cubicles. 

“Shit.”


	13. Chapter 13

Piers lined up his shot through the scope of his sniper. With the smallest pressure on the trigger the bullet sliced through the air, and hit the center of the forehead. 

“Good shot, Piers,” Ben said. 

Piers smirked and moved on to his next target. There were three of them lined across the roof, each far enough apart that they didn’t notice their fallen comrade until it was too late. Their bodies littered the roof long before they could scream for help.

“Ground team is moving in,” Chris voiced over their comms. “Cover me, Piers.” 

“Always, Sir.” 

He watched as Chris, Carl and Andy moved through the shadows towards the entrance of the building. 

Bravo team was backing them up, and Piers could see them moving through the bushes, using them as cover, as they moved towards the back entrance. 

When they had scoped the place out the day before the guard had been pretty sloppy, with just the three above, so he couldn’t imagine it was any better inside. But it was better to be safe than sorry, and since they were currently down a man they had brought in another team. 

Piers had the list of names on his desk at the office, he just hadn’t gotten around to sorting through them to find a new demolitions expert yet. 

As soon as Chris and the guys got to a safe area Piers picked up his rifle and gestured for Ben to follow, and they made their way down the hill they had been perched on, in order to regroup with the rest of Alpha. 

Chris and the boys had cleared the foyer by the time Piers and Ben made it to them. 

“Piers, Andy, with me, we’re going up” Chris said. “Ben and Carl; clear this floor.” 

There was an echo of, “Yes, Sir,” from the team before they moved into their groups and headed in different directions. 

It took them less than a half hour to work out that the building was completely deserted, and looked like it had been cleared out long before they had gotten there. What the hell had the guards been there for? Decoys? 

“Damn,” Chris said, “I was hoping to get a lead.” 

“Well, by process of elimination we’re bound to find something. You know, eventually,” Andy said, with a grin. 

Piers shook his head in amusement. He pressed the comms on his ear. “This is Alpha to HQ, the building is clear, we’re moving out.” 

“Roger that, Alpha.” 

\-----

“Oooh, wasn’t that the last one?” Andy said, looking excited as they pushed through the front door to the apartment they had been using as their base of operations in the area. The key to their operation in the town had been discretion at all costs. 

Andy fist bumped Carl. “Because I am so ready for a vacation!” 

“Fuck, yes, please,” Ben moaned. 

Chris laughed and slapped Ben on the back. “Yeah, that was the last one. We’ll do one more sweep tomorrow and then we should be heading home on a plane by tomorrow night. We’ll have a week and then we’ll be hitting the next destination.” 

“Edonia, right?” Piers asked. 

Chris shrugged. “I think so, I’ll have a look when we get back.” 

“You haven’t read the file yet?” Piers asked, his mouth curling slightly. He knew for a fact it was probably lost on Chris’s desk somewhere. Piers had been busy with their recruitment – and shit, that meant he only had a week to find someone – and hadn’t been able to organise it for his Captain. 

“Well, I might have…” 

Piers rolled his eyes. “Of course, Captain.” 

Chris shoved him and then wrapped an arm around his shoulders. “Piers, you need to have more faith in your Captain. Now hurry up and shower, you owe me a steak and a beer.” 

Piers shoved him away. “Only if you shower too Sir, you stink.” 

\-----

Piers groaned as he awakened to someone jostling him. Sharp pain made him gasp. The sensation of being on a rocking boat was making him want to vomit. 

“Sorry,” a voice murmured. “We’re almost there.” 

He wanted to ask where there was but he couldn’t seem to get the words out. A sharp jolt made his mouth open in a silent scream, and all he felt was relief as he fell back into the black abyss.

\-----

Piers looked around, trying to see if he could find where Chris had gotten them a table. He finally spotted Chris and Ben in a heated discussion near the side entrance of the bar. Trust them to find a spot where they could exit in a hurry. 

“Piers, finally!” Chris said, as he joined them. “What were you doing up there?” 

“Do we really want to know?” Ben asked, with a wink.

Piers gave them a deadpan look as he slid into the seat beside Chris. “Where’s the menu? I’m starving.” 

“Carl and Andy are grabbing some. I think they were getting beers too, but they might forget.” 

They’d probably forget. 

“So my hands have been feeling a bit dry lately,” Ben said, and he had that look in his eyes that made Piers think that whatever he was about to say was going to give Piers the urge to punch him. “Got some of that girly hand lotion I could borrow?” 

Definitely made him want to punch him. “Go fuck yourself, Ben.” 

“I have my lovely wife for that.” 

“That poor woman,” Piers said. 

“You’re just jealous.” 

“Of your ball and chain? No way.” 

Chris laughed and ruffled Piers hair. “Piers is a lone wolf,” he said, “I don’t think I’ve even seen him with a female before.” 

Piers did not want to even get into _that_ conversation. He looked around to see if he could spot where the hell Andy and Carl had gotten to. Andy was at the bar, flirting with the waitress that was pouring him beers. Well, at least he’d remembered to _get_ the beers. Carl was nowhere to be seen. 

“I’m gonna go see if I can find Carl,” Piers said, interrupting whatever Chris and Ben had been talking about. He wasn’t sure he really wanted to know anyway. He stood before they could object and disappeared into the throng of people. 

The crush he had on his Captain was not only ridiculous, considering that Chris was clearly straight, in love with Jill and they were in a relationship, but it was starting to affect his interaction with the team and he hated that. 

Piers gave up looking for Carl and instead ducked outside. He lent against the brick wall and closed his eyes, breathing in the fresh air. Unlike other places they had visited in the country this pub didn’t seem to have a lot of smokers and that smell of nicotine didn’t linger in the air, which Piers was thankful for.

He jumped when someone put a hand on his shoulder. He didn’t relax when he realised it was Chris.

“You okay, Piers?” 

“Of course, Captain.” 

“Andy got us the menus, and some drinks.” 

“Okay.” But Piers made no move to leave. Instead of leaving, now that his message had been delivered, Chris shuffled and moved in beside Piers. 

“You’d never imagine the evils that happen in the night, on nights like this,” Chris said, looking up into the sky. Piers tried not to stare at him. 

“Not always in the night,” Piers remarked. The horrors he’d witnessed after joining the BSAA had been like nothing he had ever imagined. But instead of scaring him away, it had strengthened his resolve, given him something to fight for. The BSAA was one of the only lines of defence against the monsters that went bump in the night – and the day. 

“So, I was thinking…” 

“Don’t hurt yourself.” Piers laughed when Chris punched him in the shoulder.

“There’s a dinner happening for one of Claire’s charities and it’s close to home, so Claire asked me to go. I was wondering if you’d like to go with me?” 

“Sure.” 

He had met the younger Redfield not that long ago, and she had been nothing short of amazing. He wouldn’t turn down a night to hang out with her. He was pretty sure he was half in love with her. Not that he wanted to sleep with her, or anything like that, and not like a brother either because, well…his feelings for Chris would make that way more than awkward. But she was great, and he enjoyed being around her. 

“I’m not asking you to go as my Lieutenant, Piers,” Chris said. “So, if you don’t want to go, that’s okay. It’s not an order.” 

“I’m happy to go, Captain.” 

“Could you just…look, I’m trying to…” Chris trailed off. Piers turned to look at him but Chris was facing away from him and looked strangely awkward. 

“Captain?” 

“It’s just a stupid dinner thing anyway,” Chris mumbled, “We have to wear suits and talk to people who are pretentious. It won’t be until after we get back from Edonia. Jill is going, and I think Claire was going to invite you anyway, so…” 

Of course Jill was going. Like she’d miss the opportunity to see Chris in a suit. Piers cursed himself inwardly. It wasn’t fair to think like that; it was petty and he wasn’t generally a petty kind of person. Besides, like he’d miss the opportunity to see Chris in a suit himself, he could hardly blame Jill for the same thing.

“I said I’d go, Captain.” 

Chris nodded, and then went back inside without another word. Piers raised a brow, wondering if he’d ever had a weirder conversation. 

\-----

Piers groaned as he slipped into consciousness. Someone was jostling him and if they kept doing it he was going to murder them. 

He tried to open his eyes but they were too heavy and wouldn’t move. 

Someone was touching him, pressing something wet across his skin, and it was like tiny pinpricks burrowing into him. He wanted to arch away from the touch, move away from it but his limbs wouldn’t cooperate. 

“Stop,” he croaked, thankful that _some_ kind of sound was coming out. Even if it sounded like he hadn’t used in voice in twenty years. 

“I’m sorry, but I need to clean your wounds.” 

Wounds…what wounds…? 

He winced as it came back to him. Spikes going through him, blood and pain and…how was he still alive? Maybe it was hell, it certainly hurt enough. 

“How…?” 

“I found a secure room with a bed, and some medical supplies. It looks like it might have been someone’s personal quarters.” 

That voice sounded familiar… “Ch-Chris?” 

“Yeah, it’s me.” 

Warmth spread through his arm as something took hold of his hand. 

“Your wounds are closing, but it’s slow, and you’re still losing blood. Try not to move around too much.” 

A shock of pain went through him and he fell back into darkness. 

\-----

Piers had learnt pretty quickly that his Captain was kind of odd, and his office was a place you ventured into only if you wanted to get lost. So when he found three empty cheeseburger wrappers, two watches, an odd sock (thankfully, clean), and a pack of skittles that hadn’t been opened yet, stuffed behind a stack of files on the window ledge of Chris’s office, he didn’t even blink. 

He just put the rubbish in the bin – including the sock, because he doubted that thing was ever going to find its match again – and shoved the skittles in the top drawer (and made a mental note they were there because hey, he liked skittles). He shuffled through the files they had been hidden behind, but they were from old assignments that had been closed a while ago.

He put them on the stack of files that he had brought in with him. Half of it was going to filing anyway so he’d take Chris’s as well. 

He filtered through the random pieces of files that were spread out over Chris’s desk, trying to work out the best way to put them in order without losing Chris’s place… Of course, he needed to work out _where_ Chris’s place was first; that was a task in and of itself. 

He found the phone buried underneath some Intel from their last mission in Germany. He rolled his eyes when he noticed the Alpha team reports from that same mission. There were three in there; his own, Ben’s and Andy’s. They hadn’t been signed, and he wondered if Carl had even written his. And if Chris had even read them yet. 

A knock sounded at the door and he barely had time to look up before Agent Valentine was barging through. 

“Hey, Chris, you up for some grub-oh, Piers, hey.” 

“Hey.” 

“You a personal secretary now?” she asked, with a smile. 

He kind of wanted to hate her. But she was so friendly, and pretty badass on the field, and she had saved Chris’s life more than once, so it was pretty much impossible. But he was pretty bad at chitchat to begin with, so with Jill it was a foregone conclusion.

“I just like things tidy.” 

“He struck gold when he found you,” she said, laughing. “Have you seen Chris?” 

“I think he was down in the shooting range,” Piers said. Even though he knew he didn’t _think_ ; he _always_ knew where Chris was. And he was definitely at the shooting range. Mostly because Piers had told him to get out and go do something constructive while he dealt with the mess that was his office.

“Cool, thanks.” 

When he went out for dinner that night with the boys and Chris was absent, he did not wonder whether he and Jill were having dinner together. 

\-----

When Piers awoke, he lay in blissful peace as he realized that there was no more pain. He opened his eyes and had to blink a few times from the light directly above him. He moved his good arm across his eyes and sat up, looking down at himself. 

He was shirtless, and what should have been a gaping hole in his abdomen was smooth skin. Not even a scar. What the hell had happened? There was a large tear in his pants where the spike had gone through, but his leg was as untouched as his arm and stomach. Confused, he looked around the room. 

He looked to be in some kind of personal room. There was another bed across from him and Chris was laid out on it. Piers slowly slid off the bed and stumbled across to where Chris was sleeping. 

He shook him lightly. “Chris, Chris wake up.” 

Chris didn’t utter a sound, didn’t move and Piers felt like his heart had just jumped into his throat. He shook the man harder.

“Chris!” 

Still nothing. 

God, no.

Piers knelt on the bed and pressed his fingers against Chris’s throat. He couldn’t help the sigh of relief as he felt the steady thump of a heartbeat. The last thing he wanted to deal with right now was Chris dying from his bite and turning into a mindless zombie. If it happened he hoped that he wouldn’t be the one to deliver that final blow. 

Piers cupped Chris’s cheek in his palm, stroking it lightly with his thumb. Chris looked peaceful in slumber, more peaceful than Piers had seen in a long time, if ever. Chris had always held the fate of the world in his hands, and felt the burden deeply. Piers had always tried his best to ease that burden, do what he could to lighten the load. He wasn’t sure if he had ever been successful. 

He jumped when a hand touched his, and he realized that Chris’s eyes had opened whilst he had been deep in thought. They looked slightly unfocused, but stayed locked on Piers.

“Piers,” he whispered, “I had the strangest dream. You died, and then I found you again… but everything went dark and I couldn’t remember you anymore. It was…dark…and you were…blue…Piers…” Chris’s eyes rolled into his head and he fell unconscious.

“Chris!” 

No matter how much Piers shook Chris he wouldn’t wake. He stood and ran a hand through his hair. What the hell was he going to do now? 

He looked around the room, trying to find something of use. There was a nine-oh-nine tucked into the nightstand next to the bed with some clips, so he shoved them into his pants. He shuffled through the drawers near the bed, hoping to find something else he could wear besides the tattered pants he had on. There were pieces of what he assumed had once been his shirt lying on the floor. Chris must have cut or ripped it to get it off him, and Piers was _not_ going to think too hard about Chris undressing him. 

He found some interesting prescription pills beneath what he hoped were female underwear. He tucked those into a pocket in the good knee of his pants. Heavy painkillers might be needed later. 

There were some shirts and pants in the drawer but even if he ignored the fact that they were female clothes, none of them were going to fit him. Not even close. He slammed the drawer shut in frustration. 

There wasn’t much else to the room. Not a desk, or somewhere for food, or even a bathroom. Clearly the room was for sleeping and not much else. 

He opened the door and looked out in the hallway. It looked exactly the same as every other hallway they had been in. No zombies though, so there was that at least. 

He shut it gently again, and sat back down next to Chris. There was no guarantee that Chris was going to wake any time soon, and no guarantee of _who_ Piers would find when he did. Chances were he might lose more memories while under. 

Though for a second he had remembered Piers, as the BSAA Captain, not the STARS member. What the hell was going on…?


	14. Chapter 14

Jill had never been so happy to see a single door before. It was clearly marked STAIRWELL EXIT and if she had of had time she would have kissed it on her way through. As it was, she really didn’t have time and after shoving the man with her through the door she followed and slammed it shut. 

There was no bolt on the door, which of course there wasn’t. There was state of the art tech on every bloody door in the facility, except the one she wanted it to be on. 

She shoved her gun into the back of the scientist. The tag on his white coat said ‘Laurence’. “Get moving, we’re going up,” she said. “And hurry it up, it won’t take them long to get through that door.” 

“They aren’t after _me_ ,” Laurence snapped. 

Jill pushed her gun further into his back. “No,” she said, “they aren’t. But if they get close enough one of these bullets are for you before I go down. Now _move_.” 

“All right, all right.” 

As they ran through the door to the next level Jill heard the door they had come through slam open. She took a deep breath as they locked it behind them. She knew that Piers had gone in this direction and Chris was locked in one of the rooms, unconscious. She just had to hope that she would run into either one of them during her mad dash around the facility. 

As this point hope was all she had. 

\-----

Piers clenched his jaw as he upended the drawers. Nothing, nothing, nothing. He kicked the drawer at his feet and watched in satisfaction as it broke into pieces as it hit the wall. His whole body was thrumming and he could feel the electricity buzzing up and down his arm. He was frustrated, and if he was honest he was scared.

Chris still hadn’t woken up, even from the racket. 

He wasn’t going to leave him again, not after last time. The only thing he had to be thankful for was that Chris didn’t seem to have a fever yet. It had to have been at least an hour since he had been bitten but so far there had been no symptoms. 

He also didn’t seem to be exhibiting any more symptoms from where Piers had cut him. Whatever was happening to him seemed to be lying dormant for the moment. Except for the coma like state he was currently in.

Piers ran his good hand through his hair and looked around the room. It was complete chaos now. He had looked through everything earlier but with the added time in the room he had taken to pulling each piece of furniture apart piece by piece. Literal pieces, in some cases. 

The only thing he had found out was that whoever’s room it was had a secret stash of chocolate and he really didn’t want to think about the fact that the zombies had once had human faces. That the monsters who had done this had had human faces. 

He sat down next to Chris’s prone form and gave him a little shake.

Still nothing. 

He ran the tips of his hair through Chris’s hair, resting his thumb on his forehead. 

He wished he knew what was going on, how to get Chris out safely. How to stop any of the horror in the facility from getting out. 

A loud bang sounded outside the room and Piers tensed as he stood. He grabbed his gun from the end of the bed and pressed his ear against the door. 

He jumped back at the next loud bang. He flung the door open and went out gun first, looking quickly left and right. 

There was nothing there. 

The bang came again, sounding closer. Whatever it was, it was coming towards them.

“Shit, shit, what do I do?” 

He moved back to Chris, keeping his eyes on the open door and shook his shoulder with his mutated arm, careful not to get him with anything jagged. 

He still didn’t wake. 

“Fuck,” Piers growled.

The noises were coming closer still. The steady pound of large feet running through the halls. 

He turned and pulled Chris upwards until he was over his shoulder in a fireman hold. He didn’t know what was coming towards them but he knew they probably didn’t want to be here when it got there. 

He flew out the door and ran in the opposite direction. He caught an image of something _big_ in his periphery as he turned the corner. 

_Fuck._

He ran faster, ignoring the few scattered zombies that tried to grab him as he went past them. 

A large steel door was at the end of the hall they were running down and before Piers could decide if they were going left or right it opened slightly and Quint and Keith came rushing out.

“Get in!” Piers yelled. 

They looked at him, but didn’t move.

“Get the fuck in the room, now!” Piers yelled at them, swinging his free arm around at them. 

Whatever had been chasing them must have caught up because Quint and Keith’s eyes went wide and they quickly moved back into the room.

Piers had barely slipped in before Keith pushed the door shut and Quint started playing with the screen beside it. They all breathed a sigh of relief as it clicked shut.

“What the hell is wrong with him?” Keith asked, gesturing to Chris, who was still perched on Piers shoulder.

“Is there somewhere to put hi- What the _fuck?_ ”

A figure was huddled next to a broken tubed tank in the middle of the room. They were naked, and shaking. When they lifted their heads Piers took a step back, almost losing his grip on Chris. He instinctively curled his body to the right, shielding Chris’s frame from the man on the floor. 

“Is that…please tell me that isn’t who I think it is?”

“I guess it depends who you think it is,” Keith said.

“You think that’s funny?” Piers snarled. 

“It’s not technically _anyone_ ,” Quint said. A bang sounded as the door was hit by something large, and heavy. “And I think the more pressing issue is what the hell was that!” 

“How solid is that door?” Piers asked, not turning his eyes away from the huddled figure. There was no way he was taking his eyes off the man. 

The door curled slightly at the next hit.

“Is there a back door?” 

“There’s a vent?” Quint said.

“Can you see Chris on my shoulder? Does it look like he’s crawling through a vent!? Is there a _door?_ ” 

“Start looking,” Keith said. Quint nodded and headed for the far side of the room. He started shoving the computers to the side, and feeling along the walls. 

Piers gritted his teeth as he watched. There clearly wasn’t an obvious fucking door to get out of there. Just brilliant. They had just locked themselves into a dead-end room. Fucking brilliant. 

“Shoot him first,” Piers said.

“ _What!?_ We can’t just shoot a civilian,” Quint said. 

“Civilian? What fucking civilian?” Piers spat. “That man is responsible for almost every tragedy that has happened at the hands of Umbrella. He wasn’t innocent even as fetus.” 

“That’s a bit unfair,” Keith said.

“ _Shoot him_ ,” Piers said, through gritted teeth. What the hell was he doing there? Wasn’t he dead? Chris’s report had been pretty crystal clear. 

“And I said no. I outrank you, and that’s an order.” 

“I’m not a part of the BSAA anymore.”

Keith stood in front of Piers, blocking his view. “You _are_ still a part of the BSAA. You were an integral part when you were an active agent, and you are still now. Captain Redfield believed in you, handpicked you in fact, and he trusted you to keep his back. He expected you to uphold the law, bring justice to those who deserved it, and protect the innocent.” Keith pointed at the man on the floor. “That man is innocent. He is not the man we knew, a man you never met, by the way. We are finding a way out of this room, and we will be taking him with us.” 

Piers shook his head, and stepped back. “No. You’re wrong. He needs to be put down now while he still _can_ be. The havoc he could create, the terror he could reign!” 

“I know,” Keith yelled. “I know what he did. I was _there!_ ” His voice lowered. “I’ve seen what Albert Wesker did, the lives lost.” 

“But he’s not Albert Wesker anymore,” Quint said, moving to stand beside Keith. “He isn’t anyone anymore.” 

The door screeched as the metal began to give way. 

Piers growled and turned from the two men blocking his way. He found a secure place in the back of the room to put Chris’s prone form, and checked his weapon. Whatever was out there was coming in and they had no choice but to face it head on.

“How much ammo do you have?” 

“It’ll have to be enough.” 

Piers sneered as Quint moved to the man on the floor and tried to coax him to stand and move out of the way. The man flinched and moved backwards, a look of pure terror on his face. 

“Don’t touch me, get away from me!” His voice was hoarse and broken, the words sounding foreign as though the man knew them, but didn’t know how he knew them. 

Piers turned away from them, not offering any help. If the man died as collateral damage he wouldn’t cry about it.


	15. Chapter 15

The steel door flew open, pulled straight off its hinges and hitting the wall. What came through was the ugliest BOW Piers had ever seen. It wasn’t anywhere near the colossal size of HAOS, but it was definitely not your average BOW.

Keith whispered, “Nemesis,” his voice horrified. 

The name sounded somewhat familiar to Piers and he tried to think of where he might have heard it before, but nothing came to mind. 

“Please,” the large creature groaned. “I am far superior. I am Retribution.” 

Retribution for what? Piers wondered. Who named these stupid things? He pointed his gun at it and pulled the trigger, the shot slicing point blank through the forehead. Or what Piers assumed was the forehead. The entire body was just grotesque, all twisted muscle and exposed flesh. It reminded Piers of himself, and made him hate himself just that little bit more. 

Retribution flew backwards and hit the floor with a thud. 

“That was…anti-climactic,” Keith said. 

“Who cares? Let’s get out of here!” Quint said, hurrying back to where Wesker was huddled beside Chris’s unconscious form. “C’mon Albert, we’re getting you out of here. Somewhere safe.” 

“Christ, please don’t call him that,” Piers muttered. He pulled Chris into a fireman’s hold again, ignoring the cold zipper against his naked chest. After he made sure he still had a good grip on his weapon, he moved towards the door. It was made awkward by the fact that it was his mutated hand holding Chris but there was nothing for it; he was not going anywhere else in this place without being armed. 

Retribution began to laugh from his place on the floor and Piers frowned, taking a step back. What kind of asshole didn’t die from a shot to the head? He tried to get clear as Retribution began to move but he was too slow and was hit in the side. He went flying against the wall, Chris digging into him as they fell to the ground. 

Piers groaned as he rolled Chris off him. Fuck, that had hurt. The BOW certainly had some power to him. The tell-tale _thump thump_ of movement let him know that he and Chris were about to get squashed like bugs. He grabbed the side of Chris’s shirt and pulled both of them sideways. 

The next moment he was pulled up from a hand wrapped around his neck and was flung through the glass tank. The glass shattered and he fell inside, the shards slicing deeply into him. He groaned and pulled himself up, feeling more glass slicing through his hands. Retribution was coming his way so at least he didn’t have to worry about Chris. 

Chris who was moving slightly.

Wait, what? Piers’ eyes widened. _What a time to wake up, Captain,_ he thought with disgust. He pulled the large piece of glass that had wedged into his leg and grit his teeth at the pain as blood gushed out.

He could hear Keith and Quint have a frantic conversation somewhere to his left but he didn’t have time to work out what the fuck they were doing. He barely managed to dodge the first punch from Retribution, and before it could take another swing he heaved himself out of the tank and half fell-half rolled out of the way. The cut in his leg was starting to heal over but it still hurt like a son of a bitch. 

“Piers?” 

“Stay down, Captain!” Piers yelled. 

Retribution groaned and turned to where Chris was kneeling on the floor. Something must have triggered for him because instead of turning back to Piers he headed straight for Chris. Chris’s eyes widened but he didn’t move, frozen to the spot. 

“No!” Piers yelled. He ran straight into Retribution, knocking them both violently to the ground. 

Retribution made a god-awful noise and thrashed about. 

Piers cried out as his leg was broken at the knee. He fell sideways onto his good hand and knee, groaning against the pain, his eyes clenched shut. Something pierced him through the stomach and his eyes opened in shock. He tried to turn to see what had happened but the pain was so intense he vomited and fell face first into the floor, darkness surrounding him. 

\--

“Piers!” Chris tried to get to him, but he was too far away. God no, how was he supposed to survive that? He had healed himself before but this was beyond that. He would bleed out in a matter of minutes, if not sooner. 

The creature – and he wasn’t even going to try and work out what the fuck it was – turned and stared directly at Chris as it pulled it’s arm from Piers’ stomach. Piers fell to the floor, blood pooling around him. 

Chris willed him to get up, to move, to _something_ , but he remained still.

Visions of Piers cascaded through his brain as the creature stomped towards him. 

Piers with two normal arms. 

Piers grinning at him. 

Piers looking smug while pointing to a scoresheet. 

Piers looking unamused, a look he recognised already. 

Piers looking awkward, standing next to what looked like a seedy bar somewhere. 

Piers yelling and pulling at metal bars. 

Piers’ arm being crushed. 

Piers mutating, an eye pushing through his forehead. 

Piers shoving him into an escape pod.

Chris winced and shook his head, trying to dislodge the pain and the strange pictures in his head. Were they memories? 

He tried to crawl towards Piers broken body, but he couldn’t find the strength to push himself up. He would never be able to move in time; he was going to die along with Piers down here. Maybe he and Piers would end up in the same place. The thought made him feel warm. Maybe that would be okay. 

A figure ran in front of him and began shooting a handgun. The creature didn’t even acknowledge the bullets sinking into its skin. 

“Screw this.” A shaggy haired black man came into view, holding what looked like a- Chris’s eyes widened and he put his head down, lifting his hands to shield himself as the rocket launcher was fired. 

The noise was deafening. The two men who had appeared in front of him were arguing and pointing in two different directions of the room. One of them – the man that had fired the rocket launcher – came over and grabbed his arm, helping him to his feet. He said something to Chris but all Chris heard was the ringing in his head. He shook his head at them. Piers. They needed to get to Piers.

The man frowned and began pulling Chris towards the doorway, away from Piers. Chris pulled away and tried to go back. The man tightened his hold and forced him back towards the door.

“We have to go, Chris,” the man said, his voice tinny and sounding far away. “It’s not safe. The noise alone will be attracting zombies.” 

“But Piers, we have to-”

“There’s nothing we can do for him, we have to move.” 

Chris felt something deep in his chest tug at him, a deep sorrow he wasn’t sure he fully understood as he took one last look at Piers body. The last thing he saw before they turned the corner, out of sight of the room, were zombies swarming. 

\--

Jill resisted the urge to kick the wall as she turned into yet another hallway that looked exactly the same as every other fucking hallway in this place. She turned on the scientist with her and pulled him in close by his scruff. 

“Where the fuck are we?” 

“I told you, I don’t know.” 

“And I don’t believe you, you worked here!” 

“Everyone in the facility had a certain roll, and each member only had access to the areas that they were assigned. I was assigned to the floor below, so I’ve never been up here.” 

She could believe that. If Neo-Umbrella – any Umbrella, really – was known for anything, it was their constant need for secrecy. Bastards. “How are we able to move around so freely, then?” 

“The security system unlocks all emergency exits when there’s an alarm, to allow people to evacuate the building.” 

That didn’t seem likely. Neo-Umbrella were more into locking up their mistakes and seeing what happened to those still trapped inside than to let anyone escape. Then again, these ‘accesses’ were only getting them into hallways; all the doors that led to god knows what kind of rooms were all locked down tight. 

She shoved the scientist away and paced, holding her hand to her head. What the hell was she going to do now? She was lost in a place that was who knows how big, she didn’t know where Chris was, or their team for that matter, and she had no idea how many zombies were waiting around the corners to devour her. 

Her eyes shot open at the sound of footsteps around the corner. Fuck, shit. She turned on the scientist and shoved him to get him moving. 

“Jill?” 

She twisted around, almost losing her balance. “Chris?” Relief flooded through her. 

“Jill, there you are!” 

It seemed that, miraculously, everyone had found each other. Christ, Quint, Keith and – Her arm shot, her aim centered on Wesker’s forehead. “Chris, get down!” 

Quint quickly shoved Wesker to the floor as Keith moved in front of him. “Don’t shoot!” 

Jill glanced between them, landing on Chris. “Is he serious?” 

“Put your weapon down, Jill. He doesn’t remember who he is, but he’s still your Captain.” 

Jill frowned. _Captain?_ How far back had his memory gone? “He’s not; he’s dangerous. You need to step away from him, all of you.” 

“Something happened to him, and he doesn’t have any memory of who he once was,” Quint said, still shielding Wesker…who seemed to be cowering…? 

“What does that mean?” She kept her gun trained on Wesker. If she had to, she would shoot through Quint to rid the world of the monster that had destroyed everyone’s worlds. 

“It means,” Laurence said behind her, “that he is one of our greatest creations; a memory wipe that actually worked, with the subject still intact. The state of his brain has been wiped clean, ready for us to create a life, and a personality that suits Neo-Umbrella’s best interests.” 

Jill moved her weapon so it was pointed at the scientist. He cringed back and put his hands up. Jill sneered at him. “You’re a disgusting piece of filth. Get over there where I can see you. One move and I shoot you through the head, got it?” 

“Where did you find this guy?” Keith asked. “A scientist who isn’t shooting anyone?” 

“I’m immune to the zombies.” 

“Right,” Keith said. “Pull the other one.” 

“He’s telling the truth,” Jill said. “I found him in a room with a dozen zombies and they weren’t interested in him at all.” 

“How is that possible?” Quint said.

“It’s a new pheromone my department was working on. It doesn’t deter the zombies like a repellent would, but instead it encourages them to think that I’m one of them, that I’m family.” 

“Zombies don’t have family,” Jill spat.

“If you were working on it,” Keith said, “why are you the only one that seems to have survived this? We haven’t seen anyone else alive here.” 

“I was the guinea pig; it hasn’t had further testing yet.” 

“Did you inject Piers with that pheromone?” Chris asked. His voice was hard and tense. 

Jill looked around, noticing for the first time that Piers wasn’t with them. She couldn’t think of any reason why Piers wouldn’t be here with him…unless…

“Do you mean the BSAA agent downstairs? You didn’t let him out, did you?” 

“I’m going to kill you,” Chris said, bearing down on the man. 

Jill moved in front of him and put a hand to Chris’s chest, even though she knew that if Chris so desired there was nothing that would stop him.

“What did you do to him?” Jill asked, turning her head to look at the scientist. 

“We injected him with something else, something especially designed for his particular strain. We wanted to see if we could create minions that would listen and respond to him, even some that would _bond_ with him.” 

“Bond with him?” Chris said, looking horrified.

“That doesn’t make any sense. Piers would never work for you, and his memory was intact when we saw him,” Keith said.

“Yes,” the scientist said, disappointment on his face, “for some reason our memory trials never worked on him. We think that his will to remember was stronger than the drugs we were giving to him. We could never work out why, but the mind is a powerful thing.” 

“Piers is the last person that would succumb to your sick medication!” Chris said, clenching his fists. 

The scientist shrugged. “It just meant the drugs we had weren’t working. We were in the stages of developing a new, stronger, strain that would work on him. Eventually, all minds break.” 

Chris growled and shoved past Jill. 

Before she could get a warning out he had the scientist against the wall, his feet dangling and powerless against the strength that Chris possessed.

“Piers is _dead_ because you of, and you can pump as many drugs into me as you want, but I’ll never forget that,” he hissed.

So, Piers was dead, Jill thought. A sacrificial lamb to the very end. She wondered if Piers would have ever stopped running into the line of fire for Chris. And if Chris would ever be able to move past that guilt. 

“We didn’t…” the scientist said, his voice raspy as he struggled to get air in. “I don’t even know who you are. How did…?” 

“Put him down Chris, we can deal with him later. There are some more pressing issues at the moment; like, how to get out of here,” Keith said. “Turn him into dog chow later.” 

“He doesn’t know how to get out,” Jill muttered.

“So, we could probably just kill him now, really,” Quint said. He looked like he wanted a piece of the man just as much as Chris did. 

“You’ve been in contact with it.” The scientist looked down at Chris’s bandaged arms. “Did he scratch you, _bite_ you? We always had to keep it under anaesthesia when we did work, it was very savage and killed the first few subjects outright, so we could only inject others with samples from him. We never had such direct contact that didn’t end in death! What other symptoms are you exhibiting?” 

Chris pushed further into his throat. 

The scientist gasped and tried to pry Chris’s hands away.

“Piers is not an _it_.” 

“Chris, _put him down_ ,” Jill said sternly. “We need answers.” 

Chris slowly let him down, and stepped away. 

Jill knew that confrontation was far from over. She moved forward and felt up Chris’s arm. “What are these bandages from? Is this where Piers scratched you?” Why were they all the way up his arm?


	16. Chapter 16

“And the little one said roll over, roll over,” Quint sang softly under his breath. Jill glanced at him and wondered if it would be her or Keith that killed him first. 

They stopped at the end of a hallway and glanced down the two halls it branched out into. 

“Left?” Quint said, giving them a questioning look. 

Christ, never mind, it was going to be her.

“I can’t believe you lost our map,” Keith muttered, shouldering past him. 

“Excuse me for shitting myself when the Hulk ran for us.” 

“You work for the BSAA,” Keith said slowly, like he was talking to a child, “That means the big scary monsters target _you_ , remember? And our job is to stop them, not run from them like a bunch of pussies.”

“Do you two ever shut up?” Chris asked. 

Jill gave him a worried look. He was still phasing in and out with his memories, and talking to him was a mess of ‘what do you remember, Chris?’ questions. Luckily, he didn’t seem to stray back any further than the STARS unit, so at least she could fill in any of his blanks. And there didn’t seem to be any panic. She hated that it probably had something to do with whatever virus he had been infected with. It was probably how they manufactured it, to reduce the amount of complications with the subjects. Her fists clenched. How _dare_ anyone use Chris as a fucking test subject. Even if it hadn’t bene on purpose, it still made her see red. 

“I didn’t lose our scientist,” Quint pointed out.

Jill had to give him that. The squirmy fucker had disappeared on them when they had been set upon by a dozen zombies. She couldn’t ignore the worry nagging at her that he was going to be trouble down the line. 

“How much ammo do we have left?” she asked. 

The looks they gave her pretty much confirmed they were either out, or about to be. She had to admit that Piers lethal arm would have been pretty handy at this point. 

The thought made her frown and look back at Chris. “How are you feeling?” she asked him quietly.

Chris shrugged. “Fine.” 

She let it go, knowing that pushing might do more harm than good. 

“It’s just…” He paused. “He was there…and then he wasn’t. And then he was there again, and then he wasn’t.” 

It took Jill a second to filter through that. “Do you mean…Piers? Are you-what do you remember?” 

He stopped walking, looking angry. “It’s like when Claire and I were kids and these stupid assholes at school kept teasing the stray cat with food. Giving him a little and taking it away. Giving him a little more and taking it away.” 

Jill was sure the cat would have had plenty to eat after Chris had seen that. Maybe it was that fat orange one that he and Claire talked about sometimes? The one they had found and kept? 

“I’m so sorry, Chris.” 

“Guys, we have to keep moving,” Keith said to them, from further along the hallway. 

“I have to go back for him,” Chris said, looking determined. “After everything he’s done for me, after everything he means…I can’t leave him here.” 

“Chris, he’s gone,” Jill said softly. “There’s nothing we can do for him.” 

“We can take his body home. We can give his parents closure. We can do what I couldn’t last time.” His voice was steadily rising. “We can do _something dammit!_ ” 

Keith grabbed his arm and yanked Chris to face him. “Keep your voice down,” he hissed. “I am not here to become a chew toy for the undead, you hear me?”

Chris shoved him away, looking murderous. “Fine. I’ll go by myself.”

“No-one is splitting from the group,” Quint said. “There’s only one way we’re getting out of here, and it’s together.” 

“You can take your together and shove it where the s-”

“Chris, please,” Jill urged. “You need medical attention. We need to leave. Piers wouldn’t want you to get hurt trying to recover his body.” She laid a hand on his arm and looked him square in the eye. “You _know_ he wouldn’t.” 

“Why does it keep doing this to me?” he said, his breath ragged. “Why?” 

Jill said nothing. There was nothing left to say. Chris had always had trouble dealing with guilt, with loss. The amount of baggage he carried around with him these days, in comparison to when she had first met him, was astronomical. But Piers? Piers was on a whole other level, a level where his memory kept shoving it’s way to the top, a level that Jill wasn’t even sure Chris realised or understood. And maybe that was for the best. 

\---

“Yes!” Quint cried out, pushing open the EXIT door for the stairwell.

“Quiet,” Keith said. “Last time one us was here it was zombie central.” 

“Yeah, yeah,” Quint said. He moved, gun first, into the stairwell. He called out ‘all clear’ and they began to make their way down the stairs. The only noise was their quiet footsteps. No moans, no shuffling feet. 

“From what I recall,” Keith said, “The elevator that will take us to the surface should be two levels down.”

“Do we have any idea where the elevator is?” Jill asked, from her spot at the rear.

Keith shook his head. “Not exactly. That’s where we came in, so once we’re on that floor we should hopefully run into something familiar.” 

Jill glanced at Wesker, a frown marring her face. “Can we tie him up or something at least?” she grumbled. The last thing she needed to worry about was having him shove her off the stairs. She’d already been thrown out a window because of him; she really didn’t need another disastrous fall. 

Wesker jumped and stepped forward, putting Chris between them. 

Jill snorted. What an idiot. Chris was the last person who would jump up to defend his honour. 

Chris rolled his eyes and kept walking without a word. Jill frowned, watching him closely. 

“He’s not even armed,” Quint said. 

“You’ve met Wesker, right?” Jill said. “He doesn’t _need_ to be armed to cause trouble.” 

Keith motioned for them to shut up as they reached the door that would lead them onto the elevators floor. 

He moved first, checking left and right. “All clear.” 

“I’m just saying,” Jill said, as they all unanimously headed down the left corridor. “That we have no idea what these experiments were, and if they’ll even last. What happens when his memories start coming back and he starts murdering us one by one?” 

“Morbid, much?” Quint muttered.

“I’m serious!” 

“What did he do?” Chris asked, looking at Wesker. “He doesn’t look that scary.” 

“He wasn’t exactly Mr. Nice even when he was a good guy in the STARS, Chris,” Jill said. Although technically he had been playing them that whole time as well. She ignored the familiar curl of hate in her chest when she thought of everything that Wesker had done to them, to the whole world. 

“What’s STARS?” 

Keith raised a fist for them to stop as he checked around the corner. He turned back, saying, “Okay, it looks all cle-where’s Chris?” 

Jill whirled around and sure enough, Chris was gone. “What the hell? He was here just a second ago!” She grabbed Wesker. “What did you do?” 

“N-nothing. N-nothing, pl-please don-n’t k-k-k-ki”

She growled in disgust and shoved him away. “Check the walls and the floor.” 

But there was no sign of him. Nothing that indicated a trap door, or hidden doorway.

Jill kicked the wall. “What the hell just happened?” 

“Booby trap, probably,” Keith said. 

“Do you think he’s still on this floor?” Quint asked.

Jill shook her head. How the hell would she know? _Fuck._

\---

Chris groaned and gripped the side of his head, trying to make the pain stop. What the hell had happened? 

He stumbled and fell onto his hands and knees. He tried to feel his way but there was nothing directly in front of him. Wherever he had landed was pitch black and he couldn’t even see his fingers in front of him. 

Shit, fuck. He stopped, trying to hear if he was alone or not. No shuffling feet, no sounds of the undead. At least he didn’t have that to worry about. 

Yet. 

He groaned again as the pounding in his head worsened, blocking out everything else. He fell onto his elbows as he squeezed his head. 

God, the pain. He couldn’t…he couldn’t. 

He screamed. “Piers…”

Darkness overwhelmed him and he welcomed it. 

\---

Chris awoke slowly, feeling disorientated. He rubbed his eyes as he blinked, checking to make sure he had them open. He couldn’t see two feet in front of him. Where the hell was he? He stretched out a hand and hit…something, glass? He squinted, trying to see anything. He felt around the surface, trying to see where it ended but he kept going around until he hit a full circle. 

Great, he was fucking enclosed in something. Just what he bloody needed. 

He used the glass to keep himself steady as he stood, going slow in case it was a tight fit and his head hit anything. It didn’t. He looked up but he couldn’t see anything. He lifted his arms and hit the top after a full extension. Damn, no climbing out then. 

Some kind of gas seeped into the tank and he grimaced as pain exploded behind his eyes, everything coming back to him. Going into the facility with Jill, finding Piers, encountering a nightmare. He wasn’t sure what was worse; not remembering parts of his life, or remembering when he didn’t remember them… He blanched and checked his bandaged arms. They were still throbbing slightly, so the wounds hadn’t healed over. Bitten, he thought with disgust. He had been fighting these nightmares for over a decade and never once been bitten. He wasn’t sure if it was irony, or punishment, that Piers had saved him once again. 

He closed his eyes as the loss swept over him again. To have found Piers, to have been given the chance to reverse the hell that had been China, and he had failed, again. 

Some bloody Captain, you are, he thought. He had never been fit for that role, and he should never have taken it. Not just Piers…there were dozens of faces he had failed, dozens of families who had lost loved ones because he hadn’t been able to keep them safe.

Bright lights flickered on and Chris winced at the sudden assault on his eyes. He moved his forearm to cover where the lights were coming from and squinted, trying to work out where he was.

A lab of some sort, and he was in a large tube. A man in a lab coat was standing in front of the tube, a clipboard in one hand. Chris tried to recall his name…Lance-Luke-Laurence? He couldn’t remember. All he knew was that he should have shot the son of a bitch when he had had the chance. 

“Ah, Mr. Redfield. Awake at last I see. Don't worry, the pain will pass in a moment as your memories resettle." He looked down at his clipboard. "Yes, good, good." He ticked something off with a pen. Chris wanted to shove the pen somewhere unpleasant. 

“Where the hell am I?” 

“Oh, this?” the scientist said, sweeping his arm around the room. “This is my private sanctuary. Do you like it?” 

“Yeah,” Chris muttered, “Practically a paradise.” He looked to his left and frowned in disgust. Another tube was set up beside his, but this one was filled with green liquid and held a body. He wasn’t sure if it was dead or alive. It wasn’t moving but that didn’t mean much. 

“Oh, but where are my manners!” The scientist laughed, a sound that had Chris gritting his teeth. “This is Lily,” he said, pointing at the body Chris had been staring at. “She’s my protégé. Beautiful, just beautiful.” 

Chris still couldn’t decide if that meant she was alive, or dead. Or undead. 

“And this, well…you hardly need introductions, do you?” 

Chris narrowed his eyes and tried to see where the scientist was pointing, to his right, but the area was in the dark. 

A light turned on, illuminating the area. He felt his body go slack in shock. He banged on the glass, trying to get through it. 

“Piers! Piers!” 

He was in a tube identical to the one he and Lily were in. The green liquid surrounded Piers naked body, and his eyes were closed. He wasn’t moving. Even his arm, which was usually constantly pulsing and lighting up, was still. 

“Piers!” Chris hit the glass harder. He didn’t stop, even as he felt the bruises forming and felt blood dripping down his arms. “Piers!” 

“Non, now, stop that,” the scientist said sternly. “He can’t hear you; he’s sleeping. I’ll put you to sleep as well if you continue that racket.” 

Chris turned back to the scientist, feeling a hatred and fury beyond anything he had ever felt before. “What the fuck did you do to him?” 

“ _I_ found him, and put him in here to heal, and I reunited the two of you, so have some gratitude.” 

“Gratitude?” Chris spat. “For what? Treating him like a lab rat? Experimenting with bioweapons? You’re sick and twisted and the only thing you need is a bullet through the eyes.” 

“Tut tut, I won’t debate with you, or listen to such horrid accusations.” 

Chris’s blood turned cold as the scientist smiled, a smile of pure evil.

“For you see, you are in there and I am out here. Both you and your soldier are at my mercy. Down here? No-one will hear you scream.”


	17. Chapter 17

The tanks began to move and Chris lurched forward, hitting his head against the glass. He cursed and tried to steady himself as it moved. He kept an eye on Piers tank but it seemed to be going in the same direction as him. 

He turned, trying to see where the scientists had gone but he was nowhere to be seen. That didn’t bode well. 

The tanks went down into a tunnel that was pitch black and Chris slid down so he was sitting at the bottom. If it kept shaking him like this he was going to throw up. It was nothing like the controlled movement of being in a cockpit. Hell, it was nothing like being on the water in a naval ship either. It was like being shaken inside a bottle, and he didn’t fucking like it. 

He winced when the tank emerged into a well-lit room. It was like a tomb; a box made of concrete, no windows or door except the space they came in through. Piers tank stopped opposite Chris’s. Chris looked around, trying to work out what the hell was going on.

Piers tank made a noise, and the glass slid open. The green liquid gushed out onto the concrete floor and Piers fell face first. 

“Piers!” Chris banged on the glass, wishing he could catch Piers before he fell. He grimaced as Piers hit the deck. He didn’t move. 

“Piers!” Chris ran a hand through his hair. _“Fuck.”_ What the hell was the scientist trying to do to them? 

He stiffened as his own tanks glass slid open. It was barely open enough for him to fit through before he was shoving through it, running straight for Piers prone form. 

He took gentle hold of Piers and tipped him over. He was dripping wet; his mouth was slightly open; and, his eyes were shut. He didn’t respond at all to Chris’s handling, just flopped over like a rag doll. Chris put his ear next to Piers mouth. He deflated in relief as he felt the tell-tale movement of breathing. 

He cradled Piers into his shoulder, rocking slightly. “It’s all right, Piers. We’re gonna get out of here, I promise,” he whispered, his mouth just below Piers ear. 

Chris frowned as he felt movement behind him. He barely had time to do a barrel roll as rotting hands reached for him. Piers fell back to the concrete but Chris didn’t have time to think about it before more hands were reaching for him. 

He rolled into a stand, going for a weapon that wasn’t there. He cursed and put some distance between him and the three zombies ambling towards him. Where the fuck had they come from? A quick sweep of the room showed that there definitely wasn’t any kind of opening they could have come through. Even the hole the tanks had come through seemed to be gone. 

When a zombie got too close Chris gave it a push kick to its chest, and it fell to the ground, taking the other two with it. He moved again out of their reach. He patted around in his pockets, trying to see if he had any kind of weapon on him. Nothing. He didn’t even have a fucking shirt. 

He glanced at Piers. Maybe…? He sent the nearest zombie flying with a roundhouse kick, and a well-placed punch sent the other two back to the ground. He flew around them, going the long way as they stood back up to follow. 

Making sure he still had the zombies in his site he quickly patted Piers body down, hoping he had _something_ on him. 

Nothing. _Fuck._

He dodged grabbing hands, and snapping teeth, and moved away from the rotting creatures. 

He shoved two of them, trying to separate them. When he finally got one alone he swept his legs under its feet and went down with it, using his elbow and momentum to crush its skull.

It didn’t get back up. 

One of the other zombies tripped on its dead companion and Chris snorted at it. Christ, they were dumber than dog shit. 

Chris punched the third zombie and kicked it in the back of the knee, forcing it to its knees. He broke its neck and then crushed its head with his boot, for good measure. 

The last remaining zombie was crawling towards him on its stomach, arms outstretched and reaching for him and making that godawful noise that he knew haunted everyone’s dreams. 

Before he could work out how he wanted to play this a mutated hand crushed its head, coming down hard. He looked up to see Piers standing there, looking disorientated. 

“Piers, thank god,” Chris breathed. 

Piers didn’t say anything. He looked down at the zombie he had just murdered, then to the tank he had come from, and then to Chris.

Chris couldn’t quite interpret the look he was getting. 

Piers started towards him, his mutated arm dragging on the ground. He was limping slightly, and his eyes were…were…

“Piers?” 

He just kept coming. 

“Piers, please,” Chris begged. He backed away as Piers continued forward. When he lifted a hand to grab for Chris, he could have cried right then. 

It was like everything they had gone through hit him all at once and he couldn’t breathe. He felt like someone had punched him in the throat and he couldn’t make his muscles work. Piers was…he couldn’t... The despair swallowed him and his whole body shook. 

“Piers… Please don’t do this.”

Piers stumbled over a zombie’s hand but it didn’t stop his forward momentum. His mouth opened and that _noise._

“Please,” Chris begged. “I can’t…I need you.” His voice broke on the last word. He tripped over his own feet and fell backwards. He lifted himself onto his elbows, but he couldn’t make himself move as Piers came closer. 

\--

Jill resisted the urge to smash her first into the nearest surface. She could understand now why Chris did it. It felt like it could be very therapeutic. 

“Did the files say anything about this?” Keith asked.

Quint shook his head as he checked over Wesker’s unconscious body. “I don’t know what happened.” 

“Why did you take him?” Jill asked. “Why didn’t you just shoot him?” 

“Those weren’t our orders,” Keith said.

Jill crossed her arms. “Orders? What _exactly_ were your orders?” 

Keith just gave her a look. 

“I don’t give a fuck, _tell me._ ” 

Keith stood and dusted himself off. “All I can say is he needs to make it out alive.” 

“Even if he hadn’t had a memory wipe?” 

“We didn’t know about the memory wipe when we came in,” Keith admitted. He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Look, the antibodies he has are important.” 

“That’s what Jake is for,” Jill pointed out.

“Different antibodies. When HQ learnt that there was a chance Wesker was still alive, they wanted to intercept him. I assume – and this is just my interpretation - for various reasons: if we have him contained he can’t do any further damage; and we’d have unlimited access to his blood.” Keith turned and started typing on the computers they had found in an unlocked room. 

“There isn’t a facility in the world that could keep Albert Wesker contained.” 

When Keith didn’t answer Jill grabbed his shoulder and forced him to turn. “Is there?” 

“Jill, please.” 

“Don’t hide shit from me! If that thing wakes up and is _anything_ like his former self, none of us are making it out of here alive. You realise that, right?” 

“It’s a risk, yes.” 

“And you’re still going to bring him out alive?” 

“Yes.” 

Jill made a frustrated noise and turned away from him. He went back to typing. 

Quint sighed and sat back on his heels. “He’s alive, and his vitals are fine. He just won’t wake.” He shrugged. “We can’t do anything but wait.” 

“Yeah,” Jill said under her breathe, “Wait for him to kill us all.” She pulled out her handgun and checked it over. 

They froze when the computers switched off and the lights went out. A moment later the emergency power came on, the red lights bathing the room. 

“Now what?” Quint muttered.

“Can we just get one break?” Keith said. “We got our prize; now we just want to get the fuck out of here, is that too much to ask?” 

Jill ignored him, figuring it was rhetorical.

“Well, yeah,” Quint said. “When has anything ever gone to plan?” 

“We’re not leaving without Chris,” Jill said. “No fucking way.” 

“You’re welcome to go back for him,” Keith said.

“And you’re not? Is that what you’re saying?” 

“Now, of course we are-”

“Our objective is Wesker, not Redfield,” Keith interrupted. “We can’t stay down here forever looking for someone who is more than likely already deceased.” 

“He’s a BSAA agent; we don’t leave anyone behind.” 

“We can’t risk it.” 

“I’m about to punch you in the throat,” Jill warned him. 

“Don’t turn this into an us against you thing,” Keith said. “The mission comes first. Chris knows that and he would do the same thing.” 

“Bullshit.” 

“I hate to interrupt your touchy-feely convo,” Quint said. “But I think we need to move.” 

They paused, listening. They could hear the sounds of the undead, and it sounded like they were steadily coming closer. 

“Shit.” 

Keith picked up Wesker fireman style and they piled out the door. Jill quickly snatched up a small tablet lying on the stand next to the door. She didn’t know what it was, but it might come in handy. 

A dozen zombies, if not more, were rushing down the hall to their left. 

“Exit, stage right,” Keith said. 

Jill kept her weapon pointed towards the crowd as they moved, but didn’t fire. No use wasting bullets until they really needed it.


	18. Chapter 18

Piers reached for Chris and tripped over his foot, piling onto him. His hands gripped Chris’s shoulder, digging in roughly, and his mouth opened, going for a taste of his flesh.

Chris could do nothing but let him. He couldn’t bring himself to hurt Piers, to stop him. If he was going to die, this was as good at time as any. 

“Stop.” 

Piers froze, his teeth inches from Chris’s chest. The fingers digging into his shoulder eased slightly.

“Good boy.” The voice echoed around the room, like a ricocheting bullet, but Chris couldn’t look away from Piers. “Now, sit.” 

Piers let go of Chris and sat back, resting on Chris’s outstretched legs. His eyes were devoid of emotion, and his arms hung loosely at his side. 

“Isn’t he perfect?” 

And Chris finally placed the voice. The fucked-up scientist.

“What the hell did you do to him?” Chris yelled, not sure which direction to look. How the hell could he see them? There were no cameras in the room. There was nothing in the room but the two of them, and the dead zombies littering the floor. 

“You really should be thanking me,” the voice said. It was eerie, hearing it and not seeing anyone. Chris hated the idea that he could see them but Chris couldn’t see him. “If it weren’t for me he’d be having quite the snack right now. And I would say that your infection has worn off by now so he doesn’t recognise you as friend.” 

“Fuck you,” Chris spat. He’d rather get eaten alive by Piers than have him be some kind of puppet for a sick motherfucker. 

“Now, now, language.” 

“Fuck your language!” 

“If you don’t behave you’re going to make me angry, you know. And I’m not ready for the finale right now; this is just too much fun!” 

“What the hell is wrong with you?” 

Piers still hadn’t moved from where he sat hunched back on Chris’s legs. Chris slid his hand up Piers human arm, watching for any kind of reaction.  
Not even a twitch. It was like no-one was home. What the fuck had the scientist done to him? Piers hadn’t taken any of the virus strains they were familiar with. It was one of the three that the fake Ada Wong had been carrying. One she had taken, and one Derek Simmons had been injected with. But those three vials had all been vastly different. Simmons had succumbed to his virus rather quickly after his first few mutations, if the reports Leon had sent him were any indication. Leon said in the beginning Simmons had been in control and able to reverse the mutation, in a way, but in the end he had been as mindless as the rest of the zombies. 

But Piers had only mutated once, and he was still aware of himself. And had been for over six months. Could he retract the arm mutation, like Simmons had retracted his own mutations? 

Fuck, Chris wished he had more answers. 

“Your soldier is an amazing specimen, you know. His ability to heal is nothing short of miraculous. What should have been a death sentence has been his calling to a higher power. His journey will be recorded and the scientific community will rejoice.” 

Why did he always have to run into the crackpots? 

Chris ignored the scientist and focused on Piers. “Piers? Are you in there, somewhere?” 

Chris shook him; nothing. “C’mon Piers, fight this.” 

“It’s no use, you know. He won’t respond to you. He will only respond to me. I own him now.” 

Fuck that. Piers was _his_ soldier. Piers was his everything, damn it!

Chris lunged forward and cradled Piers face in his hands. “Piers, please, can you hear me?” No response. “Piers, it’s me, Chris. Look at me.” He moved so that Piers dead eyes were staring straight at him, forced to look into his soul. “Look at me. You know. You _know_ me. We’ve been through so much together, remember?” 

Nothing. Fuck. Come on, Piers. _You’re still in there, I know you are!_

“It’s always been you and me. From the start we’ve been on the same page. I found you, and I kept you. I gave you purpose and you gave me meaning. You have to _remember, please!”_

Something flickered in Piers eyes, and Chris hoped to God that it wasn’t just his imagination. _Yes, Piers, come on._

“You can fight this, Piers; because there’s something here worth fighting for. It’s the biggest cliché in the whole world but that’s because it’s true. You know it is.” 

Chris caressed Piers cheek with his thumb. “You know why, don’t you?” He moved closer, looking deep into the cold eyes that had once held the warmth of the world for him. Always, only for him. 

“Because you and me, we’re it, right? You and me, always.” 

Chris pressed their lips together, ignoring how cold Piers’ were. He pushed harder, trying to get a response, _any_ kind of response. This was it, the moment of truth. Piers would either come back to him, or he wouldn’t. And Chris knew he wouldn’t survive the latter. Not this time. 

_“What are you doing?”_ the scientist shrieked. 

Chris felt Piers twitch and he tensed, waiting for the painful bite he was sure would follow, one that would rip his lip and jaw from his face. 

A hand gripped onto his shoulder and he waited for the inevitable deep scratching that would pull his skin from his bones. 

Instead, it held on. Lips moved gently against his. 

Chris’s heart skipped a beat, hope flaring despite all the signs that told him it was a lost cause.

A tongue peeked out and tentatively touched Chris’s bottom lip. Chris growled from deep within his chest and cradled the back of Piers head as he took what was offered. Piers whimpered and Chris came undone. 

He kissed Piers deeply, urgently, never wanting to let go. His grip tightened to a point he knew must have been painful but Piers didn’t try to break away, didn’t do anything but let Chris ravage him. 

“Stop that, _stop that._ Bite him, _kill him! I order you!_ ” 

Piers pulled back, breaking heavily. “C-captain? I ca-can’t, I can feel it-it’s trying to-” 

“I’ve got you,” Chris said. “I’ve always got you.” 

He pulled Piers back against him, taking his mouth savagely, taking everything Piers had to give and giving everything of himself in return. 

\--

Quint whimpered and fell to his knees against the fiberglass doors. “Oh my beautiful, wonderful contraption. I have never been so happy to see anything in my life!” 

Keith rolled his eyes when Quint started kissing the elevator door. “You have no idea where that’s been, seriously. And you can’t take it with you so find a new fantasy.” He gently dropped the still unconscious Wesker from his shoulder and onto the ground. 

“I don’t think he cares,” Jill said, with a snort. 

“So, what’s the plan?” Keith asked. 

“We do a perimeter search. We know where the exit is now, and we span out accordingly. Chris was taken on this level and it makes sense that he’s still here.” 

Keith nodded. “All right. Jackass, you stay here with Wesker. Jill and I will fan out and look for Chris. Meet back here in twenty?” 

Jill nodded. She checked her weapon and headed away from the two boys. She _would_ find Chris, and then they were getting the fuck out of this hellhole.


	19. Chapter 19

“You ruined it! You ruined it!” 

Chris narrowed his eyes and placed Piers behind him. He tried to work out where the voice was coming from, and how he was watching them when no cameras were visible but he couldn’t see anything. “Ruined what?” 

“How dare you, you miserable beast! Now I’ll have to dispose of _everything_ and start again. I hope you’re happy!” 

“What is he talking about?” 

Chris shook his head. He had no idea. “Let us out of here!” he demanded. 

“No! _No!_ You have to die! All evidence gone, gone, gone.” 

The scientist was clearly losing his mind. 

“Here my pretties, feast on their flesh.” 

A door opened to their left and a dozen or more zombies came rushing through, moaning and tripping over themselves. 

Chris kicked the first one to reach him in the chest, shoving it back against two more. They went down in a tangle of limbs. “Piers, run!” 

“I’m not leaving you,” Piers argued. He punched one through the head, his mutated arm slicing clean through. He twisted and swept his leg under another and stomped its head as soon as it hit the ground. “We’re in this together, isn’t that what you said?” 

Chris uppercut another zombie, and elbowed a second in the face, trying to push them back as they began to crowd around him. “We need to get out of here!” 

“No shit!” 

The cackling laughter of the scientist was not helping his nerves. 

Piers swung his arm and knocked three of them down, but they just kept coming. 

Chris grabbed Piers arm and indicated the still open doorway the zombies had come through. “We need to make a run for it.” 

“I hear you, Captain.” 

They made their way through the hoard, pushing and kicking and throwing with all their weight to make it through without getting bitten or scratched.

By the time they made it to the door they were exhausted but Chris felt like they had just accomplished a miracle. 

\--

Whatever else they were, the zombies were nothing if not relentless. They had followed Chris and Piers through what felt like an hour of corridors. Empty, white lifeless corridors with nothing but the sound of the un-dead snapping at their heels. 

Piers groaned as he stumbled and almost fell to the ground. Chris pulled him up against his side. 

“Come on, Piers, we need to keep moving.” 

“Cap-tain,” Piers groaned. “I don’t-go without-”

“No,” Chris growled. “I don’t want to hear it. This time, we _are_ both getting out of here.” 

He ignored the sounds of the un-dead following close at their heels, hungry and powerful. They had barely escaped from the room of horrors that the scientist had tried to inflict on them. After everything they had gone through to get to this point Chris would be damned if either one of them was left in this hell hole. 

He heaved Piers up further against him, taking most of Piers considerable weight onto himself. It must have been the arm, because he couldn’t remember his ATL ever weighing this much before. 

Or maybe it was because they were both exhausted beyond reason. They hadn’t eaten or slept in who knew how long. Chris had no idea how long they had been down here. Time seemed to be a blur in this place. 

Piers stumbled again and Chris cried out as they both turned and fell, hitting the ground hard. “No!” Chris said. “Come on, it can’t be much further.” He had no idea where they were going but it was _not going to end like this._

The zombie closest to them fell and began reaching for their feet. Chris kicked it in the head and pulled himself further away, hauling Piers with him. Sweat was pouring down their faces, their pure exhaustion finally catching up to them in the deadliest moment.

Piers looked half dead and his mutated arm was more of a burden than anything else at this point. It seemed every tiny movement was a complete struggle for the man. 

Chris kicked at the reaching hands and pushed Piers so he was further away. “Get up!” he ordered his ATL. He rolled and pushed himself to his knees, wriggling out of the grasp of another of the hungry un-dead. 

He had no idea how many of the zombies were behind them but it may as well have been an army the way he and Piers were struggling. No weapons, bare-chested, and they had no energy reserves to pull from. 

Chris felt and heard his pant leg rip as a zombie got a good grip and pulled. 

“No!” Piers lunged forward and fell on top of the zombie. Chris watched in horror as they rolled, unsure of what was happening. Piers was struggling, but so was the zombie. 

Piers eventually twisted them until he could shove his elbow into its face, crushing it into the floor. 

Chris moved and helped prop Piers up, resting his head on his shoulder. The zombies were coming closer and there was nothing they could do. Piers was only half-conscious at this point and Chris had nothing, no energy to pull from. 

He supposed if they were going to die, at least they were doing it together. 

“I love you, Captain.” 

Chris swallowed hard and held Piers tighter. 

_“Chris!”_

Bullets began firing from behind them, dropping the zombies instantly. A large body came barrelling past, knocking straight into the mass of zombies. Chris vaguely recognised that it was Keith, wielding a large combat knife. 

_Is that mine?_ he wondered. 

Jill’s face came into view. “Chris! Chris? Can you hear me?” 

“Cavalry to the rescue,” Chris slurred. 

Jill’s relief was so obvious that Chris wondered if he was going to have carry both her and Piers out. 

Jill looked at Piers and frowned in concern. “Is he?” 

“He’s alive,” Chris said. 

“How?” 

“Later.” 

Jill nodded and grabbed Piers, pulling him up and over her shoulder. “We have to go, Chris. The elevator is ready and waiting to take us out of here.” 

Chris could have cried. He could have fallen on the floor and wept, if he hadn’t already been on the floor and all the moisture in his body hadn’t already been sweated out. He nodded and with the help of Keith he stood, wobbling slightly. 

“You okay, Chris?” Keith asked.

“I’m fine. Let’s get the fuck out of here.” 

“I couldn’t have said it better myself.” 

Something clicked behind them and one of the doors in the corridor swung open. Dozens of zombies poured out. 

“Run!” 

Keith took Piers from Jill quickly, and they bolted. Chris pushed through the pain, through the exhaustion and kept close on their heels. He could make it. He glanced at Piers, draped over Keith’s shoulder. He _would_ make it. 

Multiple doors began to open behind them, more and more of the un-dead coming at them. It must have been the scientist unlocking the doors. Rat faced bastard. 

\--

Quint was waiting beside the elevator, fiddling with his weapon, mere corridors away. Wesker was propped against the wall, his eyes closed. Chris realised that he and Piers really had been close. Thank God for miracles. 

“Open the doors!” Keith yelled at him.

Quint looked behind them and his eyes widened. He pressed hard against the open button, continuing to press it until the doors slid open. 

Quint grabbed Weskers jacket and pulled him in as they all barrelled through into the small space, Piers falling into an ungraceful heap in the corner as Keith turned and began firing at the hoard coming towards them. 

Jill cursed as she ran out of bullets. “Close the door, hurry!” 

“I’m trying, I’m trying, it’s not doing anything!” Quint cried out. 

Chris fell onto his knees beside Piers and took him into his arms. “We’re getting out of here, Piers, just hold on.” He rocked him back and forth. “Please. Please. I need you.” 

“Try harder!” Keith growled. He gave a push kick to a zombie trying to get through the door. “Close the fucking door, Jackass, fucking _now!_ ” 

Quint yelled and punched the buttons, once, twice. A ding sounded and the doors finally closed. The rotting faces and moaning sounds cutting off abruptly as the elevator barrelled upwards. 

Jill knelt beside Chris. “Chris, is he okay?” 

“I don’t know,” Chris said. “I don’t know.” 

Piers was breathing, but he wasn’t responding. 

“We’re almost out,” Jill said. “We’re going to get him help, okay?” 

Chris nodded, but didn’t let go of him. 

\--

As soon as the elevator doors slid open Quint and Keith moved forward, weapons held high. They returned moments later. 

“All clear,” Keith said. He moved to grab Piers but Chris pulled him back.

“No, I’ve got him.” 

Keith nodded and between him and Jill they helped Chris to stand as he held Piers bridal style.

Quint grabbed Wesker and pulled him up fireman style. 

“You okay, big guy?” Jill asked.

Chris nodded, though he leaned heavily against the wall next to the elevator. “Where are we?” 

“The fourth floor of the above ground building; where the gym and lounge is. It’s the only elevator in the building, and it goes straight to the underground facility.” 

“Convenient,” Jill muttered.

“Yeah, you guys happened to find the back entrance,” Quint said.

“What about our team?” Jill asked.

“Not sure,” Keith said. “We were already below before you even stormed into the building.” 

“Intel really dropped the ball on this one.” 

“Not really, we went in covert. Intel didn’t even know about it.” 

“On whose orders?” Jill said. 

Before Keith could respond a half dozen BSAA soldiers rushed into the room. “Freeze!” the one in front yelled.

“Stand down, soldier,” Keith said. “We’re friendlies.” 

“Director?” The soldier lowered his weapon. “Captain Redfield? Agent Valentine? We’ve been looking everywhere for you!” 

“Well, here we are,” Chris said, barking out a short laugh. 

The soldier spoke into his comm. “This is Delta to HQ. We’ve found Redfield and Valentine. Director Lumley is here as well, along with Agent Cetcham. There also appears to be one BOW, and an unknown male. What are my orders?” 

“What BOW?” Quint asked, sound confused, as Chris growled, “He is _not_ a BOW you asshole.” 

“Sir, we need to take the BOW into custody,” one of the soldiers said, moving forward. 

Chris moved away from the wall, and shifted backwards. “Like hell you are.” 

“Stand down, soldier,” Keith said. “Lieutenant Nivans is a friendly.” 

“I’m sorry, Sir, but until he’s cleared we need to take him into custody,” the first soldier said. 

“Touch him and I’ll fucking kill you, understand?” Chris ground out.

Jill moved forward. “Everyone needs to just calm down. Chris, please, they’ll only need him for a little while. They can check him over and make sure he’s okay.”

But Chris knew that’s now why they wanted him. “ _No._ ” 

“Hand him over, Captain Redfield, _now._ ” 

Chris moved back another step, and his knees buckled under the weight. He cursed as he fell, Piers crushing into him. His vision began to blur and he tried to fight it. 

As his vision went black the pressure of Piers on him was relieved and he fell into darkness even as his hands reached forward.


	20. Chapter 20

Chris woke to beeping. He winced and opened his eyes, looking up blearily. He tried to sit up but a warm hand pressed down on his shoulder gently.

“Woah there, big guy. Stay down.” 

“Jill? Where am I?” 

“You’re at the BSAA HQ. How are you feeling?” 

“Like I’ve been hit by a truck.” He looked around the small hospital room. There seemed to be a drip attached to both arms, and cords running over his chest. “What’s wrong with me?” 

“Some fractures, a bump and some bruises. Blood loss, and exhaustion. They want to keep you in here for observation one more day but they said the worse has passed and you just need to regain your strength slowly.” 

Chris grimaced. “Therapy?” 

“They don’t think it’s necessary at this stage. We’ll see how your healing goes.” 

Chris’s heart skipped a beat. “Piers. Where is Piers? What did they do to him?” 

The machine next to him started beeping rapidly as Chris tried to sit and get off the bed. Jill pushed him back down.

“Chris, calm down. Everything is okay.” 

“No, it isn’t! What are they doing to him?” 

“They haven’t done anything to him.” 

Chris scowled. “Yet.” 

Jill sighed, but nodded. “Yes, yet.” 

“They can’t do this to him, not after everything he’s gone through for the BSAA. This is _not happening._ ” 

“Right now they’re just trying to determine the best course of action, but they’re immediate concern is Wesker and what they want to do with him.” 

“Where is he?” 

“He’s being detained in lockup downstairs. High security; he’s not getting out, even if he does regain his memories.” 

“He still hasn’t?” 

Jill shook her head. “Not yet. He’s terrified and adamant that he doesn’t know who Wesker is or what they’re talking about. He has basic knowledge of things, like how to eat, English language, he can even remember some French that he knows even though he doesn’t know how he knows it. How to walk, what things are, that sort of thing. But any knowledge of his part or who _he_ is, is just apparently gone.” 

“It doesn’t seem right that after everything that we’ve all gone through because of him, he just suddenly gets a clean slate and gets to live his life like everything is fine. Meanwhile, Piers is about to become some fucked up lab rat!” 

“I don’t think he’s getting out of here for a long time, regardless. And we don’t know yet what’s going to happen with Piers so please don’t jump to conclusions, okay?” 

Chris frowned and looked away. “What about Muller? Has someone told him?” 

“…not yet. Agent Berkin has been requested so she’s on her way here now and she should be here by tomorrow. But Jake is still in Washington; she was asked to specifically make sure he stayed behind. I think it’s best we decide what we’re doing before we get him involved. He’s a loose cannon at the best of times.” 

Security Operations had obviously deemed Muller as an asset and recruited him, despite the fact that, while marginally better, he was still unpredictable. At least they had been smart enough to pair him with Sherry; she could at least keep him out of trouble most of the time. 

Chris hadn’t had much of a chance to talk to Jake after China, and knew that there were still a lot of unanswered questions. But Chris hadn’t been in the right frame of mind to tackle that after losing Piers. 

God, Piers. He couldn’t allow them to lock him up and use him like a lab rat. This is not how it was supposed to be. Jill had gone through enough of that after her stint with Wesker, but she didn’t have the physical mutations that Piers was dealing with. Not to mention that the C-Virus was still rampant, and even though they had a vaccine, there was a lot that wasn’t known about it. Especially about the particular strain that Piers had injected himself with. 

“Claire is on her way as well,” Jill said quietly.

Chris groaned. He had forgotten about Claire. She was not going to handle this well. “What does she know?” 

“Not much at this stage. I spoke to her last night. She’s worried about you but she’s staying calm; I think she’s way too used to getting hard phone calls about you. I haven’t told her about Piers yet.” 

Chris knew that was for the best. He knew that Claire and Piers had kept in touch after they had first met and developed a bond. He wasn’t sure how Claire was going to react to the new situation and he’d rather be the one to tell her, and have it face to face. 

A knock on the door had them looking up. A head popped around the door and Chris’s eyes widened.

“Leon.” 

“Hey there.” Leon stepped into the room, followed closely by his partner Helena. “How are you doing?” 

“Still kicking. What are you doing here?” 

“We came with Sherry. We heard a bit about what happened.”

“They’re looking at creating a joint division to learn more about the facility you were trapped in and we wanted to be a part of it,” Helena said. “Neo-Umbrella need to be stopped, once and for all.” 

“Agreed,” Chris said. “Not that I can do much at the moment, they aren’t letting me out until tomorrow.” 

“We need to get to the meeting room,” Leon said, “but we just wanted to stop by first.”

“Where are you staying?” 

“Haven’t worked out the logistics yet; we just arrived.” 

“Well, definitely not with Chris,” Jill said with a laugh. “His place isn’t big enough to swing a cat in and with Claire coming down, there won’t be any room in the bed either.” 

Leon’s face softened. “Claire is coming?” 

“She should be here tomorrow.” 

Leon smiled. “It will be great to catch up.” 

Helena looked at Leon, a question in her eyes. “Claire?” 

“My sister.” 

“She was one of the Raccoon survivors, wasn’t she?” Helena asked.

“Yeah, with Sherry and I,” Leon said.

Helena looked like she wanted to say something, but stopped.

“Well, we need to get going,” Leon said.

“Thanks for stopping by,” Chris said. 

Leon nodded and with a pat on Chris’s shoulder he and his partner left. 

Jill sighed and slouched back in her chair, resting her feet on the bed next to Chris’s thigh. She grabbed the remote and flicked the TV on. “Let’s see what inane show we can find to pass the time.” 

Chris groaned. 

\--

Claire barged into the room without knocking. Chris looked up from tying his boots. Before he could say a word he was swamped as she barrelled herself at him. He barely stopped himself from groaning in pain as she wrapped herself around him like a monkey. 

“I was so worried about you,” she said. “You have to stop doing this to me.” 

He hugged her tightly. “Sorry Claire-bear. It all happened so fast. I’m okay, I promise.” 

“There’s something you’re not telling me,” she accused him. “I know you, and you’re hiding something.” 

Chris sighed and patted the spot next to him, and waited until she had sat. “We found something while we were down there.” 

“Like…another virus?” she asked, tilting her head. 

Chris shook his head. “No. Well, yes, there were zombies down there, and some form of BOW that we’ve never seen before, similar to Nemesis. It called itself Retribution, but that’s not what I’m talking about.” 

Claire frowned. “Chris, you’re scaring me, what is it?” 

Chris sighed. “Piers is alive,” he blurted out. 

Claire’s eyes widened and she reared back, her hand going to her throat. “What?” 

“He was down there. He had been taken by the Neo-Umbrella scientists after the underwater facility had been destroyed. They had been using him to test the effects of his virus.” 

“Oh my god, Chris. Where is he? Is he okay?” 

“I don’t know,” Chris said. “They took him as soon as we got out and I’ve been stuck in this room. Jill says he’s being held somewhere here but she won’t tell me anything else.” 

“Chris,” Claire breathed. “Are-are you okay?” 

Chris snorted. He wasn’t even sure he knew what ‘okay’ was anymore. 

“When do you-are they going to let you see him?” 

“I’m going to see him now, whether they like it or not.” 

Claire didn’t say a word, just watched him as he carefully finished lacing his boots and shrugged his jacket on. 

“I’m going with you.” 

Chris wasn’t stupid enough to try and argue with her. Besides that, having someone to lean on while he moved like a fucking ghost wasn’t such a bad idea. 

\--

Chris frowned as the scientist spoke. He could see that Claire was an inch away from losing her temper as well. He wasn’t sure the scientist knew how close to being murdered she was. It was bad enough pissing off one Redfield, but heaven help you if you got caught in the grip of both of them.

“We’ve never seen a mutation this far gone with an intact subject. His brain functions are perfectly normal, and his vitals are relatively clear. If he didn’t have the obvious physical signs, we wouldn’t even think that he had anything wrong with him. I’ve never seen anything like him, in all my years of viral research.” 

“So why can’t we let him out?” Chris asked. He hated that Piers was being locked up again. He wanted him out, and he wanted him out now. 

“Well, setting aside the obvious physical implications and the fact that he can’t be out in public looking like that, we need to run tests and ensure that he’s free of all influence of the virus.” 

“I thought you said everything was normal,” Claire said. “You can’t keep him here just because you feel like it!” 

“The _scans_ are all normal. But we haven’t observed him long enough to see any mental patterns, or if there are any triggers, or anything like that. Not to mention that we need to test his blood and find out why his body is reacting this way to it, when all other subjects succumb within minutes. Even the other stronger strains still eventually consumed the subject.” She crossed her arms and tapped her chin with her forefinger. “Simmons lasted a long time with his brain functions attached but as his mutations continued he eventually became just as much a mindless host as a zombie.” 

Chris growled, wanting to punch something.

“Why can’t he just come in for the tests? Why does he need to be locked up?” Claire asked, crossing her arms. If looks could kill, that glare would have done the scientist in.

“This is all normal procedure,” the scientist assured. “We went through the same thing with Jill, remember? The only concern we have at the moment is what to do with his physical issues after we’ve cleared everything else.” 

“I will not allow him to remain here as a lab rat!” 

“That isn’t your decision to make.” 

Chris resisted the urge to bang his head against the wall. He wouldn’t allow this to happen. He’d kill every person in this facility and kidnap Piers before he allowed him to stay here as a scientists wet dream.

“You can’t keep him here,” Claire said, “He’s not only a United States citizen, he’s also an active member of the BSAA. On what premise do you have to lock him up against his will?” 

“It’s not against his will.” 

“ _What?_ ” Chris took a menacing step forward, and _finally_ the scientist seemed to understand the danger she was in and took a step away from Chris’s towering frame.

“It was his decision,” she stammered. “He doesn’t want to be let out.” 

“I want to talk to him.” 

“I don’t thin-”

“ _I want to talk to him_ ,” Chris growled. 

“I-yes-okay.” 

\--

“Why are you doing this?” Chris asked. He hated that he had to speak to Piers through glass, like he was a fucking criminal, but the scientists refused point blank to allow him into the cell. They had almost had a fight on their hands when they said only one person could in and speak to him at a time. It had taken Chris more than a few minutes to calm Claire down, and stop her from killing everyone in sight. 

“Because I’m dangerous.” 

“Bullshit,” Chris spat. 

“Chris, just listen, okay? You think I want to be locked up like this? Treated like just another experiment for our crazy scientists to poke and prod?” 

Chris frowned and resisted the urge to pace and hit something. 

“They said that once they determine I’m not a threat, to others or _myself_ , that they’ll let me go.” 

“Just like that?” 

“Just like that. Please, you just need to be patient. You think I’m going to let someone else be your second in command? There’s no way in hell.” 

“So you’ll come back to the BSAA?” 

“If they allow me to and if my tests come back okay. I won’t risk putting anyone in danger, you have to understand that.” 

He did understand it. He just didn’t like it. 

“How long?” 

“As long as it takes.” 

Chris took a deep breath, and then nodded. “I’ll be waiting for you.”


	21. Chapter 21

_Epilogue_

_12 months later._

Chris paced across the spacious kitchen, biting his thumb nail.

“Relax,” Claire said, with laughter in her eyes. 

Chris sighed and sat on the stool next to her, and lent his elbows on the breakfast bar. “Something is going to go wrong.” 

“You worry too much, big brother. Everything is going to be fine.” 

She stood and made her way to the fridge, squeezing his shoulder gently as she passed.

Chris’s knee started bouncing. 

“Why couldn’t I have gone?” 

“Considering the state you’re in now I don’t think you’re fit company, especially considering how much trouble you’ve gotten in the last year, stomping around and threatening everything that moved.” Claire pressed down on his knee gently, to stop it moving. 

Chris frowned. “I haven’t been that bad.” 

“You have,” she said, laughing. “If anyone even dared to look sideways at Piers you were in their face. I’m surprised someone didn’t try and have _you_ arrested.” 

Chris groaned and buried his face in his hands. “What if they-”

“They won’t,” Claire interrupted. “Now drink this.” 

Chris blinked as she put a glass of orange juice in front of him. He hadn’t even noticed her pouring it. 

“I don’t want any-”

“Drink it.” 

Chris rolled his eyes and dutifully took a large swallow. 

Heavy footsteps bounded down the stairs from the entryway of the large house. Jill appeared at the doorway. 

“Hey, look who’s awake.” 

Jill grinned. “I _love_ being on holidays. And I’m taking that bed with me when I leave.”

“Don’t even think about it,” Claire said, pointing a finger. “It took me three weeks to find that thing.” 

“Speaking of finding things…” 

“Wow,” Chris said, “That was a _terrible_ segue.”

Jill shrugged and stole his glass of orange juice, finishing it quickly. “Whatever works. He should be here soon, right?” 

Chris nodded, his knee beginning to bounce once more. It had taken him the better part of six months to convince the higher ups that this course of action would work, and he would take full responsibility for it. If it didn’t end up working…he had no idea what he would do. 

The sound of the buzzing from the gate monitor had Chris stiffening. 

Claire tried to give him a reassuring smile as she moved across the room to let the car through the gate. One of the stipulations of the release was that the grounds had to be completely secure and BOW proof. That was never a guarantee but Chris had done what he could, spending a ridiculous amount of money to ensure that all the t’s were crossed the i’s were dotted. 

Chris could feel his muscles tensing, and his body was coiled, like a cobra waiting to strike. It had felt like forever to get to this point and he was terrified beyond belief that it would all be taken away in an instant. 

“C’mon big guy,” Jill said, gently taking him by the arm and forcing him to stand. 

His footsteps felt automated as they made their way to the front door. What if they-what if he-what is this just _didn’t work?_

There were times during the past twelve months that Piers had refused to see him, that they had argued, had talked for hours, had argued some more. And yet, in all that time, they hadn’t spoken about what had happened in the underground facility; truths that should have been said aloud years ago. 

What if Piers regretted it? What if they couldn’t find their way? What if-what if-

“Chris, stop it,” Jill said, her voice stern and unbending. 

Chris swallowed hard and nodded. She was right. He was being stupid. This was _Piers._ No matter what, they would get through it. 

And then the door opened and Chris’s heart stuttered, time standing still.

Because there he was; the man Chris had been waiting his whole life for. This time there was no barrier, no unspoken thoughts, no hiding. 

God, how he had missed him. Being able to see him, to talk to him, but not touch or hug or…or _anything_ , had been pure torture. 

And now, here he was. Heavily bandaged, looking tired, but the best looking thing Chris had ever seen. It was like a breath of fresh air, a cold shower after a hot day, the first bite of a burger when you hadn’t eaten for days.

“Welcome home, Lieutenant.” 

Piers smirked at him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A well-deserved and hard fought happy ending! (Sort of, there will be a sequel – a lot of things were left open and I don’t want to leave it like that forever – Wesker, the 12 months, and all our other wonderful characters!)  
> Thank you so much everyone for sticking with me throughout this long journey, I know some updates were very far apart! All the kind words and wonderful comments have been amazing and encouraged me to keep going even when I wasn’t sure the story was any good!   
> At the moment I am focusing on re-writing this story. I hope that everyone enjoys the improved/lengthened version of the story. I’m going to be putting up the updated version in one go – unless you want me to put each updated chapter up as I go? (Let me know).


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